The latest issue of Innovate includes an interview, with Trevor Owens from George Mason University, about Zotero, the bibliographic tool for scholars, writers, and students:
"Aside from the general benefit of a free and open-source solution to something that generally costs a lot of money, Zotero revolutionizes bibliographic software in three ways: It is easy to use, it leverages the common entry point to the Web (the browser), and it integrates bibliographic materials into the research process in a much more authentic way."
"While the existing reference management tools and systems have made inroads into the academic environment, they have failed to have the same kind of transformative effect that corollary innovations in research databases and word processing software have had. Why? They are not easy to use and they are not intuitive."
Zotero works as an extension within the Firefox web browser. I've just begun exploring Zotero, but will definitely consider adopting it as a writing and research tool. The best way to get started with Zotero is to view the Tour and the Demonstration screencasts and examine the FAQs. Then just dive in and begin organizing your citations on a topic; since Zotero is a full-featured bibliographic tool, it takes some time to learn all of its features. If you don't know what the word "zotero" means, don't worry--it's from the Albanian for "to master" or "to acquire."_____JH
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About
"Zotero is 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. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi)."
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