by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 31 January 2010 @ 21:01 UTC

WEAVERVILLE, NC – 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.

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).

To learn more about what Zotero can do, visit the Support pages.

I was reintroduced to Zotero recently and I must admit that things have certainly changed with this plug-in for Mozilla Firefox. There are plug-ins for Zotero in Mozilla Firefox 3.x, MS Word 2003/2007, and OpenOffice.org 3.x as well. When citing references in either of these popular wordprocessing applications, the Zotero plug-ins create available toolbars that allow the user to access their Zotero libraries from any PC connected to the Internet as long as you have synched your Zotero library information to the Zotero Server. Inserting, editing citations, inserting bibliographic (reference information) is a snap with Zotero in both wordprocessing applications, too.

Please view this introductory video on Zotero. If you’re a college or graduate student like me, then Zotero is your research assistant that lives in your Web browser and favorite wordprocessing app.

Zotero is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is generously funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.