Tools of the Trade: Zotero

I really really like Zotero. It’s a little hard to explain what it is - but think of it as refworks/endnote on your web browser.  I like it so much that I’m considering making my students in a class next semester as a way of sharing citations and ideas.

So far I’ve only used it for my own benefit while writing my dissertation and keeping track of what I read.  It’s got little widgets for Word and for Open Office which hook into it and allow you to put citations in text.  It even kept up with a painfully large number of citations for my diss.  Word was a much bigger pain in the butt than  Zotero was in getting everything formatted.  It’s a great tool for this but it’s SO much more than just a reference manager.

It organizes notes and helps me keep my pdfs in order.  This is no small feat given that most everything I have is in pdf format (that’s not in a book) and I regularly get pdfs and other miscellanea from interlibary loan.  Putting everything regularly into Zotero is the easiest way I know of to keep track of all these files and then find them later.

But here’s the really cool thing for a social scientist like myself.  I study a relatively new field where much of the data and information often comes via the web.  I read blogs and try to keep up with webpages and newspaper articles, online magzines, blogs, governmental documents and other clippings.  This is where Zotero is fabulous at helping me keep all this stuff.  It allows me to take web screenshots on topics that might change and turn them into citations.  It can grab any of these different types of sources and keep them which is a HUGE benefit when looking to keep track of something that shifts and changes so quickly.  I can now use my screenshots as data.  How cool is that?

Plus it’s syncable so I can have it on multiple computers and get all the notes, pdfs, screenshots if I’m at home or if I’m on campus.

They’re also starting up a new thing called Zotero groups which I am seriously considering using for my advanced seminars next semester.  There’s just something wonderful about the possibility of citation synergy among students as they do research and begin to connect with one another about their research.