A beginner's look at Zotero

I was alerted to the potential of Zotero after reading a positive review in a blog post on tech tools at Inside Higher Ed. Zotero is a tool that allows you to amass and organize a bibliography, drop citations into your documents in preformatted styles like APA, MLA, etc., generate reference lists, and share your library collections and those belonging to other people with similar interests.

Zotero lives in your browser and is synced to the web-based version. It sounded like a useful tool - one that would do away with the mind-numbing slog of putting citations and references in proper format if nothing else - I was immediately interested in whether students would gravitate to it for this purpose. So I set out to learn how to use it.

The first thing I learned is that Zotero is designed for Firefox or Safari and doesn't work with Internet Explorer. There is also a stand-alone version that has a Chrome plug-in which made my happy as Chrome is my favourite browser. I downloaded both to have a look.

Let's look at Zotero using the Firefox extension. After you have downloaded Zotero (and Firefox 4 if you don't have the current version) there is an icon in your Firefox navigation bar that lets you add something to your Zotero library with one click if the item is a book (i.e. you are browsing in Amazon etc) or a publication with available bibliographic information. If you are searching for articles from a database like PsycINFO from within your library's gated access, you can even add a folder of search results in one click if Zotero has a site translator that works with your database search engine (it doesn't for Capilano University's search engine).

You can also add items manually. It's good if the items have a doi because then you only have to enter that manually and all of the other bibliographic information is added automatically. You can add whatever you want manually but the automatic entry is only possible for items that Zotero recognizes as books, articles, etc.

You can tag your library items, add notes, and attach pdfs and screenshots. Once an item is in your library you can leave it unfiled or you can organize your library into collections and save items into one or more of these. You can also share your collection with others and view the collections that other people and groups have shared. Zotero also has a good search function that allows you to quickly search through the items in your library.

Zotero creates a bibliography or reference list automatically in a number of styles such as APA or MLA. In the test run I did using about 10 library items, the references appeared in perfect APA style except for one item which had the article title wrongly capitalized in the original - Zotero does not appear to correctly identify these types of mistakes so manually checking of the resulting list is still required. It is however, better than similar Reference lists I've seen generated by MS Word or EbscoHost. It appears from the discussion forums at Zotero.org that these glitches are being fixed, but I am not a big fan of having to correct something manually unless there is a large net gain in the overall amount of time I have saved.

Zotero also has an add-in for MS Word that automatically cites authors in your library in correct - in this case  APA - format. It seems to assume you want the citation to be inside parentheses so anything outside parentheses would have to be done manually or corrected.

So the big question is would I use Zotero? I'm not sure. It is obviously a useful tool, but its greatest utility will require commitment and a preference for using it over or as well as other tools. I use delicious to bookmark websites that look useful but that I don't frequently access, or to save items for students. It tends to be where I save bookmarks that have some potential to be useful for a while. I use Twitter to capture websites that have some immediate use or appeal. So I probably won't use Zotero merely to archive information from the web because I already have tools that are quick and easy.

Zotero could be useful to me as a professional development tool - keeping track of books and articles that I am interested in reading. But there are probably faster ways to do this - I could save them in an Amazon search without having to go the extra step and putting them into Zotero.

The greatest potential of Zotero would seem to be saving and managing items that are being used in research and writing. However having vast numbers of items means that organizing them into collection would be critical because it would take too long to look through them or to remember what's in there otherwise. Plus I'm more likely to do a current search of available books and articles when I need then, rather than rely on a library that may not have been kept current. I do like the generation of References and if I were doing a lot of scholarly writing this would be useful. The interface is easy enough - it looks like iTunes.

I suspect students may use Zotero as an aid to formatting citations and references in styles such as MLA or APA. However as a tool merely to create proper bibliographic formatting - I think it would be too much trouble. Students with lots of writing to do would probably find Zotero useful for organizing their bibliographies and for helping them get citations and references correctly formatted. A big benefit to using Zotero is that it should increase the correct attribution of sources - something that is becoming increasingly lost in our copy-and-paste culture.