Review: Zotero Makes Research Easier and Quicker
Fast, easy and free
Most people who have done any sort of research know what a pain it is to cite sources. There are ongoing problems concerning correctly citing sources even though it is a fairly common practice. The pressure and punishments of incorrectly citing a source can range from minuscule to severe. To avoid plagiarism and incorrect citations, many different websites and tools have been created to help you efficiently form accurate citations.
At A Glance
With Zotero, you can collect, manage and cite your sources with ease. It is a free comprehensive tool. Zotero is produced by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Corporation for Digital Scholarship. It is also funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Zotero’s standalone version is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It also has extensions for several different browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.
Pros
Zotero is a free, cross browser and cross platform tool. It offers numerous citation styles with APA and MLA just being a few of them. You can save your citations or bibliography as a RTF, HTMl, copy and paste it or even print it. The options it provides you are numerous and practical at the same time. Zotero can store seemingly everything such as books, articles, documents, web pages and sound recordings just to name a few. The items which you choose to save will appear in the center column. Metadata, which consists of titles, creators, publishers, dates and other data will appear in the right column.
You’re able to further organize your library by creating different collections which are useful when working on different projects as you can place items into different folders as you choose. To take your organization skills a step further, you are even able to add tags which will allow this item to display in the search results for this tag. You can also add attachments (e.g. Word and Excel files) and notes to any item.
The word processor integration which this tool offers is very useful. You can insert citations directly from your word processing software (i.e. Microsoft Word and OpenOffice). This allows you to cite pages, sources and include in-text citations, footnotes and end notes with ease. The integration is surprisingly smooth and I didn’t experience many flaws while testing it.
You are able to sync Zotero with multiple computers. This is a very convenient and appealing future especially for those who may have more than one computer. To sync your library to Zotero servers all you have to do is create an account on zotero.org. It is fairly simple and doesn’t require much information. With the creation of your account, you are then provided 100MB of storage on their server.
Cons
This tool is not immediately intuitive. It took me a while playing around with it until I got the hang of it. It should be noted that there is a tutorial which you can watch that helps out a lot. Also you have to pay for extra storage space. This may or may not affect you depending on whether or not you want to utilize their server. Another disadvantage discovered through my use was that the Microsoft Word plugin is available only to Firefox users. As a loyal chrome user, this was a disadvantage for sure.
Zotero vs. Websites (e.g. EasyBib)
Before testing Zotero, I was an avid EasyBib user. EasyBib is very appealing for those who just want their citation spit out after easily inputting a URL or supplying the information details. For simple, automatic citing of a source EasyBib is efficient and gets the job done as long as you go over the citations and ensure they are correct. If you are looking for anything more than a citation, EasyBib is not the tool for you.
Issues
In 2008, Zotero experienced some controversy when Thomas Reuters sued the creators of Zotero for reverse engineering its competitors product EndNote. In 2009, the lawsuit was dismissed by a judge.
Overall
If you are looking for a simple citation output, I wouldn’t say this is for you. If you are looking for anything more, I’d recommend this tool as it is not only perfect for students and teachers but also for anyone who wants to keep track/organize information found on the web. This tool is powerful, effective and thorough. It may seem daunting at first but quickly its usefulness becomes prevalent.
