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:
