Zotero is a free program for citations management and bibliography generation designed to be competitive with Endnote and similar products. I've been using it for a couple of weeks. Zotero lives as a Firefox extension and it's best feature is the ease with which you can import citations from the web. If you are looking at a paper on JSTOR, for example, you can "one-click import" the citation. One-click import is also available from Amazon, Cite-Seer, ABI-Inform, the Library of Congress, many university library catalogs, Medline, Google books and many others.
Thus it's very easy to generate a citations list in Zotero by visiting a handful of large databases – this is especially easy for books and not too hard for recent articles but it's more difficult to find older articles in online databases. Zotero's interface is somewhat clunky so entering citations by hand is not as convenient as I would like. In addition to grabbing the citation, Zotero can grab entire PDFs so you can keep articles and citations in one database. Exporting of the citations in a variety of bibliographic format is clean and well done.
Zotero is only available as a Firefox extension (the developers take a perverse pride in this fact). The developers are at GMU, although I don't know the team at all. Zotero will import citations from another citations management program so switching is low cost. Worth checking out.
‘Preesh’.
From their FAQ:
Will I be able to use Zotero with Internet Explorer or some other browser?
No. We cannot reproduce the functionality of Zotero in most other browsers due to their lack of equivalent support for extensions. Many of Zotero’s advanced features, such as the ability to sense and grab citations from web pages, are only possible because Firefox exposes all of its underlying functionality to extension developers. Microsoft and many other browser creators don’t allow extension developers to call on more than a tiny fraction of their code. This explanation may be no solace for inveterate IE users, but we hope that IE users who like the functionality of Zotero will give Firefox a try.
I love this tool. It works well, and you can warp it to serve data gathering functions that are less about citation management and more about serious knowledge management. It’s really easy to use but very powerful.
GMU, its like Texas if it comes from there it must be great? GMU is blazing a path in the ratings I noticed. I like competition and free looks good compared to the cost of updating my aged version of Endnote..
Great program. Just what I have been needing for school. Will use it a ton….All the more reason to use Firefox.
Zotero is indeed awesome… highly recommended. Great support for JSTOR, NBER working papers, and other journal sites like Wiley. And although there is a little bit of a learning curve to writing your own web site scraper, with a little work you can easily grab citations from anywhere.
I used Zotero for a while and liked it. It seemed to have especially good potential for keeping track of citations, links, and .pdf files for things I read while browsing the internet. Better integrated with web browser than EndNote is. And free. But I found the default location and naming convention for downloaded .pdf files awkward, because I have my own organized system of folders for saved files. If I moved and renamed the file myself after a Zotero session, the links in the Zotero citation no longer worked unless I changed them manually to point to the new location. It was too cumbersome. Perhaps somebody can tell me how to set the Zotero defaults. Meanwhile, I just quit using it.
I’ve used it for grant-writing (biomedical) for about a year and a half. Has worked very well for me (including a funded grant). No complaints from reviewers or granting agencies, so I think it’s been fine.
Highly recommended.
Mark
Reactions to Zotero may very much depend on which version is used. I urged my colleague to try it, and he was unimpressed with V1, but was sold once he tried V1.5beta (now V2beta).
Tyler: porting something like this from browser-to-browser would essentially mean completely rewriting it from the ground up, if it is possible at all. So it is pretty reasonable to limit it to one browser. (Seriously, in the case of a well-written application cases it would probably be easier to port a traditional desktop application from windows to linux or mac than from firefox to IE or vice-versa.)
Nate: Chrome has even less plugin support than IE does. (Ditto Safari, though Chrome has at least suggested they might add it in the future, which Safari has not.)
If you’re working on a Mac, my best discovery last year was Papers (http://mekentosj.com/papers/) – basically an Itunes for .pdf files, you can search and download files within the program from Google Scholar, JSTOR, and other databases, and then can easily export bibtex and endnote libraries for either the whole database or a selection. Amazing.
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This explanation may be no solace for inveterate IE users, but we hope that IE users who like the functionality of Zotero will give Firefox a try.
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