Category: Web/Tech

Zotero

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.

The Green Dam is Down

This is welcome news and in combination with recent events in Iran provides an interesting commentary on the state of free expression in the world today.

Caving to public pressure, China on Tuesday said that use of its controversial "Green Dam Youth Escort" software is not required….The ministry official added that while all computers sold on the mainland will feature the filtering software, individuals are free to decide whether they use it. 

Assorted links

1. Markets in everything: strange beds.

2. Lawrence H. White joins our faculty.  In addition to his economics savvy, Larry is an expert on surf music and Bollywood.

3. Will England lead the recovery due to its monetary policy?  I hope you're all still reading Scott Sumner.

4. Secret Ballot: an excellent satirical movie on whether Iranian democracy is savior or farce.

5. $134 billion in bearer bonds; trying to get to the bottom of the story, via Chris Masse.