A Hidden Gem in Zotero
After playing around with Zotero, a popular research tool that can help you painlessly cite your sources, I’m hooked. It’s just like magic and the best part is it puts everything in alphabetical order. For now this just seems like the hidden gem I’ve needed for the past few years. I’m now questioning why professors don’t mention this tool when citing sources properly?
So Who Created This Masterpiece?
And no I’m not referring to the ruby above, I’m talking about Zotero. Well according to the about section on Zotero’s website, ‘Zotero is a production of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University”. Zotero has been and still is a collective achievement, many people have worked to produce the citation tool and many people use it prolifically today. Speaking of it’s prolific usage, this software is open across multiple operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS. Plus, on top of that, it’s open source software that as Kyle Denlinger mentions in his article titled 10 Ways to Get Your Citation Game on Point with Zotero, “you don’t have to pay to continue using Zotero” even when you leave your college’s wifi network.
Why I Love Zotero and Why You Should Too
Too many times you’ll go to Easybib and be confronted by the painful task of filling in what the citation tool just can’t find. The real reason why you should love Zotero is because it couldn’t be easier to get started with the and use. The plugin is literally in the top part of your web browser at all times so it just makes citing a breeze and the standalone can be kept open and synced with the web too. You simply click the plugin icon and Zotero adds all the relevant information that it can find to your citation library and then from there you can even create smoother workflow by integrating this tool with Microsoft word. For instance, if you wanted to make changes to the bibliography you added in with Zotero and you need MLA as apposed to APA but you’ve already formatted everything for MLA, then you can swap to APA and Zotero keeps the alphabatized order while changing all the formatting issues for you.
It Isn’t All Rainbows and Unicorns
To kick off my only issues, there is a minor problem in terms of the timeframe when pressing the Google Chrome extension. Sometimes the tool doesn’t work at all and usually there is a small delay. This is the case when the Zotero standalone is open alongside the browser extension. The second fault I found in Zotero was the outdated look and confusing aesthetic of the library setup on the website but not the downloaded program itself. The standalone download is oddly better and this baffles me. The images for each function just don’t match up to what you would think they do on the website. For example, next to the nice export button circled in blue there is this weird list-looking button that has you select the type of format such as APA or MLA (in orange) and the even more confusing is this carrot scrolling icon to the very right (in pink), which is your settings. Who comes up with these things, right?
But regardless of the faults the tool as a whole, after some getting used to is a godsend, so spend some time getting used to it before you judge it.
