Zotero - a GREAT citation management tool built for today's information
I posted to this blog over a year ago wishing for a citation management tool that is both better equipped for today's styles/methods of culling and managing articles for research support and support some form of intelligent aggregation tool to cull in newer (related) articles from a variety of sources rather than put the burden on the researcher/reader. We're getting closer there yet but I'm happy to report that I've found a citation management tool that I'm getting really excited about. So long, EndNote, Refworks...
Zotero is a great new web plug-in for Firefox (also works with Flock and Netscape) that was put together by folks at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University with grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Mellon Foundation, and the Sloan Foundation. I mention this because you can see that it has been primarily an academic endeavor targeted at academic usage and not commercial property.
The tool is free and open source and it sits right in the bottom-right corner of you browser as you work. When you come across an article/web page/resource, you can draw up the tool by clicking on it. Then you can do anything from drag the link to ask Zotero to capture the page for you. It can either capture the reference or, cooler yet, take a snapshot of the page and save it to a local directory for you. For standard journal articles, it will automatically capture the citation reference, URL, and provide you with options to enter notes and/or tags to maintain the reference in your collection. If your citation is not a journal article, you have your choice of over 30 types of references - from artwork to email to podcast - by which you can identify the item. This is a great expansion of resources that reaches out more to humanities and other researchers as well as non-academic type researchers who are searching for ways to better manage references through more than bookmarks. Even if you want to record a citation that is not in a web page or electronic, you can easily do a manual entry and create a citation reference for something that you are reading offline and add it to your library.
Now the cool stuff. After you have built your citation library, Zotero can export your library to yo desktop in a variety of formats including ZoteroRDF, Endnote, BibTeX, RIF, and Dublin Core RDF. This can then be used to build your citation list in your word document article. Interestingly enough, Zotero can also import citation lists from your desktop as well. Zotero also uses OpenURL resolvers for uniformity across citations.
For anyone who is struggling with citation management or even wondering about why they would want to manage citations, Zotero is a great tool to look into for organizing your references and ideas. For a guy like me who juggles multiple blogs, this thing is priceless... Now if we could only build in that feed/peer tool...
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