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Zotero
Zotero is a free program for citations management and bibliography generation designed to be competitive with Endnote and similar products. I've been using it for a couple of weeks. Zotero lives as a Firefox extension and it's best feature is the ease with which you can import citations from the web. If you are looking at a paper on JSTOR, for example, you can "one-click import" the citation. One-click import is also available from Amazon, Cite-Seer, ABI-Inform, the Library of Congress, many university library catalogs, Medline, Google books and many others.
Thus it's very easy to generate a citations list in Zotero by visiting a handful of large databases - this is especially easy for books and not too hard for recent articles but it's more difficult to find older articles in online databases. Zotero's interface is somewhat clunky so entering citations by hand is not as convenient as I would like. In addition to grabbing the citation, Zotero can grab entire PDFs so you can keep articles and citations in one database. Exporting of the citations in a variety of bibliographic format is clean and well done.
Zotero is only available as a Firefox extension (the developers take a perverse pride in this fact). The developers are at GMU, although I don't know the team at all. Zotero will import citations from another citations management program so switching is low cost. Worth checking out.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on June 17, 2009 at 07:35 AM in Data Source, Education, Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
'Preesh'.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 17, 2009 7:43:52 AM
Odd that they would be proud to only serve Firefox, since it is a bulky and memory-intensive program.
Posted by: Jack at Jun 17, 2009 8:57:41 AM
From their FAQ:
Will I be able to use Zotero with Internet Explorer or some other browser?
No. We cannot reproduce the functionality of Zotero in most other browsers due to their lack of equivalent support for extensions. Many of Zotero's advanced features, such as the ability to sense and grab citations from web pages, are only possible because Firefox exposes all of its underlying functionality to extension developers. Microsoft and many other browser creators don’t allow extension developers to call on more than a tiny fraction of their code. This explanation may be no solace for inveterate IE users, but we hope that IE users who like the functionality of Zotero will give Firefox a try.
Posted by: RC at Jun 17, 2009 9:59:20 AM
And the Zotero developers (and GMU) just beat a very stupid lawsuit against them... http://quintessenceofham.org/2009/06/04/thomson-reuters-lawsuit-dismissed/
Posted by: Andrew Fischer at Jun 17, 2009 10:26:58 AM
I love this tool. It works well, and you can warp it to serve data gathering functions that are less about citation management and more about serious knowledge management. It's really easy to use but very powerful.
Posted by: The Other Eric at Jun 17, 2009 10:40:30 AM
I have used this for years and love it! I have published with this tool in several journals using the Open Office plugin for bibliography manager. The down side is it doesn't have as many journal formats available as the for profit citation managers, but I have always found what I need in their gallery. The formats are open source XML files, so if you need to you can specify your own and share it.
Posted by: NucleoD at Jun 17, 2009 11:34:05 AM
GMU, its like Texas if it comes from there it must be great? GMU is blazing a path in the ratings I noticed. I like competition and free looks good compared to the cost of updating my aged version of Endnote..
Posted by: edwardseco at Jun 17, 2009 12:28:45 PM
I've been using it to organize and keep track of my chemistry literature, and it's worked very well indeed. Recommended.
Posted by: Derek Lowe at Jun 17, 2009 1:10:47 PM
Great program. Just what I have been needing for school. Will use it a ton....All the more reason to use Firefox.
Posted by: George Baker at Jun 17, 2009 2:43:42 PM
I've been using it for months. It's great and waaay cheaper than Endnote
Posted by: Zach at Jun 17, 2009 3:36:14 PM
Zotero is indeed awesome... highly recommended. Great support for JSTOR, NBER working papers, and other journal sites like Wiley. And although there is a little bit of a learning curve to writing your own web site scraper, with a little work you can easily grab citations from anywhere.
Posted by: Andy at Jun 17, 2009 4:05:13 PM
I started using Zotero several days ago, but it's kind of tough to figure out. Takes some getting used to.
Posted by: Pareto at Jun 17, 2009 4:57:54 PM
I used Zotero for a while and liked it. It seemed to have especially good potential for keeping track of citations, links, and .pdf files for things I read while browsing the internet. Better integrated with web browser than EndNote is. And free. But I found the default location and naming convention for downloaded .pdf files awkward, because I have my own organized system of folders for saved files. If I moved and renamed the file myself after a Zotero session, the links in the Zotero citation no longer worked unless I changed them manually to point to the new location. It was too cumbersome. Perhaps somebody can tell me how to set the Zotero defaults. Meanwhile, I just quit using it.
Posted by: parke at Jun 17, 2009 5:15:49 PM
BibTeX export is still a little off, which makes it useless for those of us in heavily mathematical/quantitative disciplines.
Posted by: Ben Kalafut at Jun 17, 2009 7:02:57 PM
I've used it for grant-writing (biomedical) for about a year and a half. Has worked very well for me (including a funded grant). No complaints from reviewers or granting agencies, so I think it's been fine.
Highly recommended.
Mark
Posted by: Mark at Jun 17, 2009 7:08:40 PM
Alex - the developers seem responsive to feedback - perhaps everyone who uses it and has problems with its interface could send over some ideas for them on their website? :)
Posted by: Rob at Jun 17, 2009 8:10:08 PM
Reactions to Zotero may very much depend on which version is used. I urged my colleague to try it, and he was unimpressed with V1, but was sold once he tried V1.5beta (now V2beta).
Posted by: frank at Jun 17, 2009 9:34:55 PM
I understand them not wanting to support IE, but why not Chrome?
Posted by: Nate at Jun 18, 2009 11:55:47 AM
Tyler: porting something like this from browser-to-browser would essentially mean completely rewriting it from the ground up, if it is possible at all. So it is pretty reasonable to limit it to one browser. (Seriously, in the case of a well-written application cases it would probably be easier to port a traditional desktop application from windows to linux or mac than from firefox to IE or vice-versa.)
Nate: Chrome has even less plugin support than IE does. (Ditto Safari, though Chrome has at least suggested they might add it in the future, which Safari has not.)
Posted by: Luis at Jun 18, 2009 7:14:29 PM
dd that they would be proud to only serve Firefox, since it is a bulky and memory-intensive program.
Posted by: Jack at Jun 17, 2009 8:57:41 AM
Is this true? Isn't the beauty of firefox that it isn't just that, unlike chrome which is a memory-glutton? That's the other definitive edge firefox has over chrome, apart from supporting a plethora of plug-ins.
Posted by: Sayalee at Jun 23, 2009 2:54:13 PM
If you're working on a Mac, my best discovery last year was Papers (http://mekentosj.com/papers/) - basically an Itunes for .pdf files, you can search and download files within the program from Google Scholar, JSTOR, and other databases, and then can easily export bibtex and endnote libraries for either the whole database or a selection. Amazing.
Posted by: Melanie at Jul 4, 2009 5:18:31 PM
Hi, Zotero is indeed good. Can I ask what is the difference between Zotero from other free reference managers? For example, Mendeley, Wizfolio and Biblioexpress?
Posted by: Monica at Sep 24, 2009 6:11:31 AM
