Zotero Will Change Your Life
Open source is good. Evidence is good. Zotero is good.
I started doing my PhD when the most powerful computers in our department were an Amstrad wordprocessor, and a BBC-B microcomputer. The internet had barely been heard of. And when you wanted to do an online library search you had to book expensive time with a librarian and sit with them, asking carefully prepared questions. You couldn’t ‘browse’. Life wasn’t like that.
In terms of relevance, the signal-to-noise ratio of the material you located was high. You’d have spent so much time preparing what to look for, that the search results were manageable and relatively easy to process. However, compared to today’s world, the signal itself was relatively weak. There wasn’t so much of it. In other words, back then, the challenge was to find enough stuff to go on.
Now we have the opposite problem. There is so much available, to all of us, that the question becomes how to manage the mind-snapping complexity of it all. Online time is cheap and instantly available. You can browse as far and as wide as your imagination permits. The ‘signal’ can be very strong indeed — you can find loads of relevant information. But it’s often embedded in limitless quantities of noise.
