I should take a moment out of my busy day to tell you about Zotero (sometimes mispelled as zotoro, zetero, zotaro), the research tool I have been using. Zotero eases the task of writing papers by automatically keeping track of bibliographical information. It improves the quality of my assignments and helps prevent plagiarism by organizing quoted material into collections. It saves time with the technical details of organizing sources, allowing me to focus more on things like grammar, spelling, presentation and content.

Goodbye, 3x5 cards, sticky notes, pencils and tape. Hello Zotero!

"Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] (Zotero | Home, 2009) is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself."

Several documentation styles are included. If you need a different style of documentation links, click on Zotero...Actions...Documentation...Sites, Styles and Standards--available citation styles.

The citations Zotero generates are well-formed, but the date usually shows up as n.d., which is a pain because I have to go back and look around the page to find the date. It also sometimes gets things wrong, so I'm always double-checking the author(s) and titles to make sure they are correct. Perhaps if these pages used the proper tags... Still, it beats managing the collection manually and it does keep track of where quotations came from, lets you attach notes to your items, upload other content via attachments, add tags and related links.

Everything is kept in a file folder which, if you can locate it on your computer, (on linux it was in $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/plpzjz8g.default/zotero) can be backed up and restored or copied to another machine.

Copyright (C) 2009 Henry Kroll III, thenerdshow.com

Zotero Style Repository. (n.d.). . Retrieved May 18, 2009, from http://www.zotero.org/styles.