Zotero

Watch a short demo on what Zotero offers.

Zotero Video Transcript 

Zotero  – a powerful, free online/offline research tool for the Firefox 2.0 Web browser.

With Zotero, web-based bibliographic information from sites like The New York Times or Amazon.com can be captured with the click of a button.

The source information can then be viewed, edited, and organized online or offline by opening the Zotero Firefox extension.

As you can see, the source item, a book in this case, is now saved in our Zotero library. All information about the source item is saved as well.

In addition to capturing bibliographic information for single sources, Zotero can grab multiple sources all at once. Suppose you’ve found a good collection of works on a library’s web site. Instead of writing down all bibliographic information, you can have Zotero sense all the information on the page with the click of a button.

After sensing all sources, Zotero allows you to choose which ones you’d like to save. And you can view the collected sources by opening the Zotero extension. With the selected sources imported, you can then group your collection.

Once you’ve saved a collection, you can enhance individual sources by adding more information. You can edit source information such as the title and author fields. You can add note cards to the source. In fact, you can add as many notes as you like, and do full-text searches on them later. You can also attach files such as PDFs or Word documents. You can add keywords or tags for cataloguing and reviewing sources, notes, and files. Then you can export sources as formatted citations, or save them along with notes and files to use on another Firefox browser that has the Zotero extension.

Because of its ability to sense sources on a webpage, and because it can be used offline, Zotero is a powerful research tool for scholars and students alike. And best of all, it’s free!