Some thoughts on Zotero, The Next Generation Research Tool (part 1/2)

In my effort to disseminate information regarding electronic research aids, I thought it might be a good idea to write a little about one of the more exciting pieces of software I've stumbled upon recently. It's called Zotero, and there's a few things you'll need to know about it before I go into any detail on its functions and uses:

Zotero is:

• A lightweight, non-intrusive extension for the Firefox web browser
• A tool which allows researchers to store, retrieve, organize, and annotate digital documents
• Completely free
• Available in many languages
• Supported by an informative and up-to-date official website
  

Zotero is not:

• Designed to supplant traditional, handwritten note-taking
• Compatible with any other browser besides Firefox
  
• Able to add annotations to PDF documents in the way it does to webpages (more on a workaround for this later)

As an undergrad (and indeed as an MA student working on a 20,000-word dissertation) I relied more or less completely on hand-written notes shoved away into various folders. When it came to writing essays/dissertations, I would spent countless hours organising notes, taking notes from my notes, and organising those notes - not a good way to work. In addition, having to dash up to the library on campus to verify the page-number of some quote I scrawled onto a piece of crumpled paper six months prior was frustrating, and I was determined to find a solution to these problems for my PhD.

I ran some Google searches for a free research tool with the ability to store and organise my notes and retrieve bibliographic information (to be imported into a Word document at a later date), but I didn't want to fork out hundreds of pounds for a fancy piece of software with all the bells and whistles attached.

Endnote seemed popular and caught my attention at first, but at £120 this wasn't just failing to fulfill my criteria (I want it for free!) but offered a lot of features that I didn't really care for - why pay over a hundred quid for, among other things, built-in manuscript templates when I can make my own on Word? The other products I found proved similarly unappealing - expensive and overloaded with features. Finally, in the comments of some obscure online forum I heard mention of the name 'Zotero', and I was instantly curious.

For those of you who have taken Internet Explorer for granted as the only real web browser out there, allow me to correct your assumption: it's not, and it's probably the least secure one too. Mozilla Firefox champions itself as "faster, safer and smarter" than IE, pointing to its speed, performance, and open-source nature as just some of the reasons why you should ditch IE in favour of it. Here's my two-penny's worth - Firefox is safer, and here's one big reason why: less people use it. IE is targeted by viruses more than any other browser simply because of it's popularity, and whilst Firefox is hardly a fortress against such attacks it supports multiple 'extensions' (bits of software you attach to the browser) which help guard against them. For IE, you're pretty much relying on Microsoft to guard your data.

But I digress. Zotero - "the answer to my prayers" proclaimed one academic when I told her about it. To understand how Zotero works, and to appreciate the power of it, I'd advise installing it first (assuming you're running Firefox - you're not still on Internet Explorer, are you?), and then making your way to the Amazon homepage and paying attention to the changes you'll see in your browser.

First of all look to the bottom right hand corner of your screen, above the Windows clock there - you'll notice the Zotero logo. If you click on it it will expand to cover the bottom of the screen, so that now you can view the three main tabs within Zotero itself: the one on the left is for organising collections, the middle one shows all of your stored items within the collections, and the right column displays the information relevat to the currently selected item. And that's it! Try running a search for a book on Amazon - now you'll see a tiny icon at the end of your address bar at the top of the browser. If you scroll over that icon you'll see "Save to Zotero (Amazon.com)". Now if you click it, Zotero will pull down all the necessary bibliographic information on the book you searched for, and store if there for you. Look inside Zotero and there it is - you can create a new folder (in the left column) and drop it into there, or you can add notes, attachments and tags to the item (in the right column - tab between these various options by clicking on 'info', 'notes' etc.).

I'll leave it at that for now - try it out, add some items to your list (that little icon won't show up on every book you look for on every website, but the list of translators is growing all the time, and I hope to add some of my own one day), and compile some notes to add to them. In my new post we'll look more closely at what you can add into Zotero, and how to import some of this data into a Word document to help you in writing your research papers. I'll also introduce a way to work around Zotero's difficulties in annotating PDF documents. I'm sure in a few weeks for now I'll be able to post an update on it too - I'm still getting used to this wonderful little tool myself!