Zotero: the best open-source app you’ve never heard of.
There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Zotero. But, speaking from experience, Zotero is one of the best open-source projects out there. What is it? In the project website’s words:
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.
If you spend time doing research, you’re probably familiar with EndNote or RefWorks; this is the same idea, but with a couple advantages:
- It’s integrated into your browser. You can download a citation on a web page to Zotero with one click.
- It lets you write and store notes in the same database as your citations.
- It’s free (as in both speech and beer).
It’s got a lot of other goodies, too: you can drag-and-drop citations into Word, OpenOffice, or an email; sort with tags and filters; full-text search as-you-type; and store and index pdf’s, web pages, and documents. The video below gives a three-minute overview:
Zotero has attracted some very positive attention. It’s funded by the Andrew W. Mellon and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations, and according to the website it’s also being recommended by libraries at institutions like Harvard, Cornell, Georgia Tech, and dozens more. Surprisingly, though, a lot of my colleagues have never heard of it. If my experience is any indication, that’s going to change.
I’ve been using Zotero for over a year now, and I can say it never fails to impress. Some of the things I love:
- If I want to store a copy of a PDF from a site, I just click and drag it to the correct Zotero entry. No stupid save dialogs.
- Organizing with tags, filters, and saved searches is way more flexible and powerful than nested folders.
- I hate wanting to cite something and not remembering what article it’s from. Indexed full-text search to the rescue. Love it.
- I hate typing. I love dragging several dozen references from Zotero to Openoffice and seeing them pop up as APA formatted citations.
- Having every thing I need–PDF, notes, citation–in one place for each article really speeds my workflow.
- And of course, I can’t even guess how much time one-click citation downloading has saved me over the last several hundreds of citations.
I could go on and on, but I’ll try to stop before(?) I become Mr. Obnoxious Open-Source Advocate Man.
And of course, there are some areas that could be improved. First, there are ways to make Zotero portable, so you can access you collections on different computers. There are ways…but there are not easy ways. The plan is for a central online space in which users can store collections; that would be a great solution, but it hasn’t happened yet. On the whole, Zotero is remarkably polished; there are, though, a few little annoyances here and there. If you generate a report for a collection, for instance, you can’t customize the fields (although see my Zotero report customizer here). Zotero is tied firmly to the Firefox browser; for some folks this is a distinct problem, regardless of how much we Fx users may love the ‘fox.
On the whole, though, I love Zotero. If you do research–especially if you’re not yet using a reference manager, you should give Zotero a look. I think it’s an open-source project that’s ready for the big time.
OK, you’ve peaked my interest. Downloaded and installed…we’ll see if I can learn to use it. If it automatically puts citations in APA or MLA format….that is very powerful.
Thanks for the tip!
[...] along to you. Jason Priem left a comment on my site and I followed the link back to his blog and found this amazing Firefox add-on that I thought some of you might enjoy. I’ve been playing with it for about an hour now and I [...]
Yep, pretty powerful. MLA, APA–and a few dozen more to boot (although I’m pretty much all APA all the time, meself).
Kia Ora
I teach chemistry. I have used this theme in the classroom and often referred to it as a model but not the way it is depicted in the video.
While the theme on the video appears to be chemical elements and their reactions there really is little learning on chemistry conveyed, which is a pity. The idea is one that has some merit but without some careful thought to the plot there’s little to pass on to a student who would like to learn what chemistry is really all about.
Thanks for the opportunity to view a video with a chemical theme.
Ka kite
from Middle-earth
@Ken: [I think Ken meant to comment on this post] Good point; if the video was the only chemistry instruction your students got, they might end up with some unusual ideas about the subject, to say the least. In the classroom, I think the virtue of the piece would be less in teaching “what chemistry is all about” and more in provoking a discussion or maybe introducing a project.
I liked your Zotero report customizer. But, what if I want to exclude other fields than the ones you selected? With books, for instance, sometimes I don’t need or want info like number of pages, ISBN, short title, call number and repository. Thanks for your work!
Margaret, it wouldn’t be too hard to exclude those as well; I find that I’m pretty short on time since I got my new job, though, so it may not happen for a little while. However, if I get any other requests to add those categories I’ll make it a priority. Check back in a few weeks?
Thanks! I will!
Just found zotero while looking for an OOo compatible reference manager (have been using bibus). Looks great, and your report customizer is (almost) a great help. I would be (almost) completely happy if you were to include the exclusion of the “Abstract”
I pull article refs from ISI Web of Science, and while I like having the abstract locally, it takes up a lot of space in the reports.
Thanks for your work!
As is often the case, I appear to have spoken too soon. It seems the “Create Bibliography” produces exactly what I want for my library without the need to delete the abstracts. I just break it down by year and get manageable, reasonably chronological listings of the refs. Though, a fully tailorable Report editor would still be nice. Thanks again.
[...] discussed in a previous post, I’m an enthusiastic user of the free reference manager Zotero; I’m impressed with how such young, open-source product has managed to quickly outshine [...]