Zotero Review

Full disclosure: I'm not a professional software reviewer. I'm not a professional blogger. I'm not associated with the Zotero project.

So, why am I qualified to review a citation manager on a decidedly non-professional blog?

Because it works in real life. As a grad student in a demanding program, I've put Zotero through its paces and it has performed brilliantly.

Zotero, for those not in the know, is a free reference manager created by the Center for New Media and History. Its a Mozilla Firefox extension that lives in your browser and captures bibliographic information from around the web.

Bibliographic management is not generally something that people get really excited about. I, for one, am thrilled about it. Here's why its great:

• Easy to add information with one click.
• Microsoft Word or OpenOffice integration into word processing documents.
• File and attachment syncing across machines.
  
• Cross platform. It goes anywhere that Firefox goes, which is to say, everywhere.
• Automatically attaches PDF and snapshots to references.
• Easy to add notes. Notes also autosave.
• Drag and drop to create bibliographic references in any word processing software, such as Zoho or Google Docs.
• Search indexed PDF files, bibliographic information, and notes.
  
• Group libraries! Share Zotero with a bunch of people and collaborate.
• Developers committee to free, open source software that works great! They really listen to their users and constantly strive to make it a better product.
• Free!

My research is now the most organized part of my life, thanks to this amazing and simple piece of software. There are other products out there that aim to do much the same as Zotero, but in my decidedly non-professional opinion, they do it far less elegantly.

As the Zotero tagline says, citation management is just the beginning.

Zotero.org (Follow on Twitter @Zotero)