Zotero: A Research Tool for the 21st Century

by Trevor Owens, Center for History & New Media

Libraries, museums, and commercial vendors have made enormous strides in putting the world’s cultural heritage at the fingertips of students and scholars, but they have done relatively little to enable researchers and students to incorporate those materials into their work. One doesn’t expect a researcher to leave her pencil and notebook outside the library; instead she is able to take notes in the library, at the site of her research materials. The same should be true of digital libraries and databases — a researcher should be able to create and annotate her unique personal collections within the browser - the common denominator across all such sites.

To help remedy this situation Mason’s Center for History and New Media has developed Zotero. Zotero is a free, easy-to-use, open-source research tool that helps users gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then annotate, organize, and share the results.

It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (such as Endnote)  with the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will find and  save the full reference information in the correct fields.

The best introduction to Zotero is the three-minute, online demonstration. There is a lot more information at our website. Zotero also can be downloaded and quickly installs in the Firefox browser.

Zotero is the culmination of two years of work at the Center for History and New Media. Developed with funding from the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Zotero is rapidly gaining ground as the premier research-management tool. Currently about 40,000 people a week are using Zotero for their research.

If faculty members are interested in using Zotero for their own research or are interested in introducing students to Zotero, please feel free to contact Trevor@Zotero.org for more information.