clifflandis.net

Sometimes I sit around and dream of the perfect tool. The waffle iron that does my taxes. The electronic pet sitter. The personal-assistant-in-a-box. Then occasionally, some of these tools will magically appear, such as the USB beverage chiller. Zotero appears to be one such tool.

I’ve been waiting on the perfect citation manager. One that:

• is free
• allows me to cite all forms of media
• allows me to attach that media to the citation
• allows me to make my own notes and tags for those citations/media

Zotero, a Firefox 2.0 extension, is able to do all of these. However, in addition I want a citation manager that can be accessed anywhere. Although Zotero isn’t web-based (yet), it can be successfully installed on Firefox Portable, and taken with you on a flash drive (I had to download the .xpi file, because Firefox Portable didn’t want to recognize the extension). Once it is installed on your flash drive, you can take your citation manager (and the attached files!) with you to any computer.

Zotero is supposed to automatically pick up metadata. In my sample search in online databases, however, it was unable to automatically harvest the metadata from the citation page–I tried to create a new citation from a Library Journal article, but it grabbed “EBSCOhost” as the title. This means that I’ll be doing most of the data entry by hand, since I primarily use citation managers for academic purposes.

**Edit:  It looks like the problem is with EBSCOhost databases–I tried getting the same article from a ProQuest database and it worked as advertised.

It allows you to “attach” files to records, but these are actually links to local copies of the files (so I keep the saved articles on my flash drive). Once files are attached, I can choose to “view file”, which opens it in the browser, or “show file” which opens the local folder the file is saved in. I primarly use PDF so that I can comment on documents, so I will need to open the file in Acrobat (and not Acrobat Reader). The citation manager also allows for “notes,” but these refer to the article as a whole, which doesn’t help me.
Zotero also allows me to create relationships between citations, tag them, and organize them into folders. These features will become useful as I prepare articles and bibliographies.

Last, the extension allows the user to input a citation, and then click the “locate” button to search for the article at George Mason University (one of the sponsoring institutions). In the future, I hope to see Zotero allow local searches. This could come in quite handy when searching GALILEO!

It looks like future versions will include citation sharing, and perhaps exporting in different citation styles.

I stumbled upon Zotero while looking at reference management software in Wikipedia. It looks like it could be very beneficial to researchers as well as students, and I look forward to seeing what features they add.