Research Tools — Reviewing Zotero
What is Zotero?
Zotero is free to use software that allows the user to save, organize, and cite tons of online scholarly sources. Zotero was made and is run by the Roy Rosenzweig center for History and new Media but is an open source project, and therefore also relies on the efforts and help of its community members to better content and fix any bugs or issues. The range of Zotero’s abilities are quite extensive. All of the research you save into the software is fully indexed, allowing one to easily search the text for specific information by matching keywords. This information is stored in ones own personal research “playlists”, where it can be organized and tagged with any desired specific words. Zotero also makes the writing process easier by having integrated a powerful citing system that can automatically create footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies for the user. Thousands of publishing styles are supported on Zotero with more and more being added each day, ensuring a wide range of publication outlets. Your Zotero research is saved both on their servers and across any desired number of user devices, (except I don’t believe mobile format is yet supported). Lastly, this software allows one to share their findings with any other Zotero user, supporting an interactive online learning community.
Impressions
The Zotero website is very clean and intuitive and most of the information you’d ever want to know about the service and the organizations and people that help fund the project are easily attainable. This research tool requires a download, and is supported on all three major computer operating systems (windows, mac, and linux). To get the most out of Zotero, it is recommended that you create a quick online profile with them so that the syncing process of your saved research information is seamless, but it is not required. Next you should really add the Zotero browser extension to your specific browser, it makes saving online sources a flash. I decided to go to another article I’ve written here on Medium to test out the software; I clicked the Zotero save button and…Woah! Just like that my article is saved in the standalone app. It saves all the relevant information I’d need to either cite the blog post or re-access it. Don’t currently have internet access but wish to look over your research sources? With Zotero, your saved sources can be viewed on or offline in your browser. And what’s more, citing your sources all of a sudden became fun. Zotero integrates into word by adding a little menu in the top left of your screen; from here you can cite anything in your research library by searching it or you can also insert a full bibliography.
Davis, Julie Hirschfeld. “Obama and Netanyahu Seek to Move Past Rift Over Iran Nuclear Deal.” The New York Times, November 9, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/world/middleeast/obama-netanyahu-iran-nuclear-deal.html.
The bibliography entry above was created automatically for me by Zotero, with the click of a button.
Conclusion
Zotero is a great tool for anyone’s research arsenal. Although the service itself and its workings are well explained, actually using the standalone app isn’t as intuitive as one might imagine. How to use Zotero’s features is thoroughly explained on their website, so you’ll probably find yourself there once or twice. The fact that you can access your save online sources offline is an extremely valuable factor to me, in fact bumping up the score I would given the service. Its true selling point to me though is the fact that it makes citing sources easy and fun. Zotero really does allow you to simply, focus on your writing.
For saving time and effort, while adding versatility and convenience, I give Zotero a
