Zotero (pronounced zoh-TAIR-oh).

There seems to be a lot of buzz about Zotero on UC campuses and in blogworld. The following message from Terri at SFGH nicely summarizes what it does:

"I have recently started to use Zotero the Firefox extension and I am finding it fairly easy to use and I like its ability to store screen shots of webpage as well as links, article citations and PDFs and add notes and organize related items in libraries. In addition to easy capture and organization of information from the web it also has the capability of generating formatted bibliographies and includes a Word plug in similar to Cite while you write. "

Zotero is open source software, so it's free. It's an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resource.

Before you decide to try it keep in mind that at present Zotero is tightly linked to the Firefox browser only and will not work with Internet Explorer. It's also the new kid on the block, while EndNote and RefWorks are well established tools and have a huge user base. There are advantages and disadvantages to all bibliographic/research tools. I'll be writing more about Zotero in the future.


Click here to go to the Zotero website for more information.

Please remember that the library does not endorse any particular software application.