As I’ve written before, I love the free citation manager Zotero.   And the group and sharing features that just dropped as part of v2.0b7, while still a little buggy, are taking the awesomeness up another level.

But one thing about Zotero has always really annoyed me: the horizantally-split screen.  I never feel like I have enough vertical context for either my Zotero library or the web page I’m viewing.   Meanwhile, I’ve got a whole ‘nother monitor just sitting there empty. Some other folks have complained about this too, suggesting a sidebar view for Zotero.

Today, though, I realized that there’s a really obvious solution: just open up a new Firefox window (ctrl+n), put it on my other monitor, and display Zotero full-screen there.  Dual-monitor workflow bliss.

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:

1. It’s integrated into your browser. You can download a citation on a web page to Zotero with one click.
2. It lets you write and store notes in the same database as your citations.
3. 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.