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Zotero: Home

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

What is Zotero?

Zotero is a easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. Zotero is a Firefox add-on. Easy to use. Lives in your web browser where you do your work. It's FREE.

A Beginner's Guide to Zotero

What can you do with Zotero?

  • Create and manage citations of books, articles, videos, etc from the web, databases and the Rhodes Library Catalogue
  • Add searchable notes and tags to citations
  • Annotate and organise research results
  • Save information about a reference, including author, title and publication details
  • Attach files, links, notes and PDFs to records
  • tag and sort records
  • Create bibliographies in preferred output style
  • Manage in-text citations in Microsoft Word
  • View records in My Library when offline
  • Easily share references with others

 

Pros and Cons of Zotero

Pros:

  • Great for importing records for non-traditional references, like wikis and websites.
  • Helps to organize web screenshots and PDFs. You can make PDFs searchable by choosing to index them in the preferences menu. 
  • Easily imports records from many of the resources you already use.
  • The program lives where you already do most of your research, in the browser.
  • Imports records from several major databases that won't work with EndNote & Mendeley, including Factiva, USPTO, Espacenet, & FreePatentsOnline.
  • It's user-friendly.
  • Easily retrieves PDF metadata, like title and author information.
  • Synchronizes collections among multiple computers & backs up data.
  • Offers option to create user profiles and groups, so you can share your collection.
  • Detects proxy servers automatically, making off-campus access to library databases easier.

Cons:

  • Need to pay for extra storage space.

 

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