The Research Tool Every Student Needs
FOR STUDENTS AND RESEARCHERS, managing references and articles can be a pain. Proprietary software exists to help reduce that pain, but it costs a pretty penny, and isn’t available to Linux users. Luckily, there’s an open-source, free alternative.
I first stumbled upon Zotero while perusing through the Document Foundation’s list of LibreOffice extensions. While I’d seen it listed on Flathub—a repository for flatpak packages—I hadn’t actually looked up what the program does.
Simply put, Zotero is a repository for documents and resources to help people manage their research. Do you remember having to look up how to write an APA or ALA bibliography as a kid? Remember how formatting them in Word was a pain in the backside? I do. Zotero can do all that formatting for you.
Created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University under the GNU Affero General Public License, Zotero is a personal research repository. Unlike Evernote and OneNote, the focus is on maintaining bibliographical information for documents and clipped articles. Zotero’s main competitor is Calitive Analytics’ EndNote, which is only available on Mac and Windows, and costs $250 (discounts are available for students). Zotero offers many of the same core features for Mac, Windows, and Linux, all without the price tag.
Zotero essentially comes as three parts: the Zotero program, the browser plugin, and the word processor extension. The main program is where you’ll do a lot of the organization of your sources. An entry in Zotero is based on a bibliographical entry; each bibliographical entry can have as many sub-entries as you need. Sub-entries can be images, PDF documents, web snapshots, or user-defined notes. (Notes are handy for pasting relevant excerpts for later use.) Zotero indexes all entries and PDF documents, allowing for full-text searching. Entries can be tagged and put in one or more collections (folders).
There are many ways to add entries into Zotero. The Zotero browser extension is available for both Firefox and Chrome, and allows you to add entries to your library without going back to Zotero. The icon for the browser extension changes depending on the context of the web page you’re looking at. If you’re looking at a book on Amazon, the icon changes to a book. If you’re looking at an article in the New
York Times, the icon changes to a newspaper. (This doesn’t work for all news sites, however. I noticed that Zotero didn’t identify an LA
Times article as a newspaper.) The real power of the web clipper is in what information it saves. The extension saves bibliographical information it can find, but also saves an HTML snapshot of the website as you saw it. If you’re looking up journal articles at sites such as Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, or IEEE, Zotero attempts to download the full-text PDF as well. Both the web snapshot and PDF are saved under the appropriate entry in Zotero. The browser extension files the entry into whatever collection you have selected in the main application.
The third part of the application is the word processor extension available for LibreOffice Writer and Word. Out of the box, Zotero allows you to add citations in IEEE, Chicago Manual of Style, and American Psychological Association (APA) formats, to name just a few. To add a citation, you simply click a button and enter search terms in a dialog. Depending on the citation format, Zotero inserts an inline citation, footnote, or endnote. The extension maintains a list of your citations in the document, so it can insert an entire bibliography with a single press of a button.
If you’re staring down the barrel of a term paper due at the end of this semester, take a look at Zotero. It might just save you some time, money, and headache.
The extension maintains a list of your citations, so it can insert an entire bibliography with a single press of a button.