Zotero

December 27, 2008 in open source, Social Networking, Technology | 2 comments

Zotero is a Firefox plugin and a powerful open source research tool. This great utility makes it much easier to do online research by helping you gather, organize, and cite your information. Rather than reiterating the features, here is a video tour of Zotero.

A higher resolution version can be seen here.

As mentioned in the video, Zotero automatically collects from a number of sites and database, but those represented are institutional. What about independent sites such as self hosted blogs? Fortunately, for WordPress bloggers, there is an extension that allows visitors using Zotero to glean the post title, author, date, blog title, categories, and URL for each entry. Apparently, there are MediaWiki templates that can also interact Zotero. It would be great to see a broader set of open source tools with such functionality. While Blogger is not an open source tool, it also appears to work with Zotero.

Zotero also has plugins for integrating Microsoft Office and Open Office.These plugins allow you to easily insert citations and bibliographic information into word processing documents. You can select from a number of different citation formats. Those not using either office suite can use their clipboards to paste formatted bibliographic information into their docs.

Currently tethered to an individual computer, a server based Zotero appears to be in the works. Zotero 1.5 with Sync is currently in final beta. Sync allows you to synchronized your Zotero collections across computers.  With Version 2.0, you will be able to share your collections with others for collaboration. Eventually, the Zotero server application will be released.

While Zotero, is a great tool in and of itself, the server based ability to synchronize data between computers is extremely important. If you do most of your work on one machine, then Zotero is fine out-of-the-box; however, in an environment such as my K12 school, students log on to different computers and will want to transmit their collections to home computers. It looks like the sync functionality is nearing prime time.

This still relies upon Zotero’s servers. I am not sure about their privacy policies and CIPA compliance as there is no statement on the website. Setting up an account requires an email address, so it appears that use by students under 13 would be out of compliance. For younger students we may have to wait until individual schools can set up their own server side Zotero. While this is on the drawing board it does not appear to be occurring in the near future.

Zotero has great utility as it is. The release of Version 1.5 with synchronization will greatly improve the product. Once the server side application is released with full collaborative and sharing capabilities, Zotero has incredible potential.

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  1. Matt Leifer’s avatar

    Matt Leifer on December 28, 2008 at 8:33 am

    I’m a big fan of this sort of software, but until they add bibtex support I’m sticking with Papers (http://mekentosj.com/papers/), which is sort of an iTunes for references.

    You might also want to check out Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com/), which is a sort of LastFM for references.

    Reply

    1. Steve’s avatar

      Steve on December 28, 2008 at 10:54 am

      Hi Matt-

      My understanding is that Zotero does support bibtex:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software

      Papers looks very impressive for the Mac user (which I am), but of course, it isn’t free.

      Mendeley looks interesting. I like the fact that it free (currently) and works across platforms.

      I plan on experimenting with such software with my students (Grade 5) and perhaps others in our K12 school. It certainly must be cross platform and have a web based component as they work on different computers. Of course, these guys are not serious academic researchers, but I believe they will benefit from using such software.

      Zotero seems best suited for less formal research as while it works with pdf files, it can extract data from a wide variety of websites and wikipedia articles (the latter certainly not used in serious research).

      If I got into serious research myself, Pages looks very appealing. That being said, I am probably leaving the Mac OS for Linux as Apple simply does not produce a computer that suits my needs–something less that an eight processor server/work station, but certainly not an all in one.

      Thanks for the input. I will certainly give them a trail run!

      Reply

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