Another look at Zotero I'm planning to show some of the librarians Zotero tomorrow and so, I was reviewing it once again. I wrote about Zotero back in November. To review, Zotero is a Firefox plugin that allows you to manage a bibliography. It's quite easy to use and is a really effective way to manage your research. I'm still struggling myself with managing my information, using del.icio.us for managing the plethora of web articles I want to keep track of. I started using Furl and moved to del.icio.us about a year ago. Mostly I wanted a way to pull up articles from the web no matter where I was. But del.icio.us and other social bookmarking tools also allow me to find even more material. Zotero doesn't yet have this sharing ability, but hopes to add it soon. Not everyone wants to share, but I've found it really useful to see sources that others use related to my own. I've found sources that I might not have found via a regular library or web search.

Zotero's strength is its congruency with the academic work flow. Along those lines, they've recently released an alpha version of a plugin for Word. What this allows you to do is to add citations and a bibliography right from Word. I gave it a try and it works okay. It is alpha, so one shouldn't expect much anyway. It installed very easily. You have to copy a .dot file to the proper place, but they have very clear instructions. I'm assuming this will be automated in future releases. It currently doesn't format the citations correctly, putting the parentheses in the wrong place. They're working on that. But, creating the bibliography itself worked like a charm. They're also planning a plugin for Open Office (which is what I'm writing my own dissertation in).

I continue to be impressed with Zotero and I still highly recommend it as a bibliography tool. If you haven't tried it yet, what are you waiting for?

¶ 9:41 AM, posted by Laura