Zotero is a useful Firefox extension for research management that lives at the bottom of your browser. It is easy to use and excels at automatic recognition of sources, organization of sources, note-taking and annotation, and export and citation.

Organization

Like any bibliographic database tool, Zotero easily records publication information about sources. Automatic recognition of sources on web pages through COiNS and other metadata is excellent. Organization of sources is very intuitive and easy. You create collections of sources, which can have subcollections as well. Multiple items that are part of the same source, for example a book source record and a link to a web page containing an excerpt of the book’s text, can be bundled together collapsibly under the main source record. The My Library view shows sources from all collections in a flat view. The organizational structure works very well, but, unfortunately, when it comes to exporting sources to a bibliography, there is no option to include items in subfolders, so you must go into the My Library view and select the sources you want to export.

Store copies of web pages and files

Probably the single best feature of Zotero is its ability to store copies of your sources. Rather than having to keep track of an HTML or PDF file saved on your hard-drive, you can simply take a snapshot of a web page, and Zotero stores a copy locally, which you can later view without having to worry about where you kept it (or if you’re offline). You can also attach any file type to a source record and Zotero will store a copy of that file. This is a helpful feature that gets rid of a lot of manual organization normally involved in research.

Notes and Annotation

You can create plain-text notes (basic formatting would be a welcome addition), either attached to sources or standalone. Notes, along with snapshots and PDFs (if you have PDF-to-text software installed), are full-text indexed by Zotero for searching. Sources and notes can also be tagged and linked to related items.

Highlighting and annotation of saved snapshots is very simple. In order to highlight text, one must simply select it. Annotations, similar to sticky notes, are added with ease.

Exporting

Zotero can save selected sources as bibliography entries in many different styles, such as MLA, the Chicago Manual of Style’s style, and those of many journals (and more can be installed). These can be saved to RTF or HTML, printed, or copied to the clipboard. It can also export to many formats, including BibTex and, amazingly, Wikipedia {{Cite}} templates. An HTML report containing a summary of source bibliographic information and the full text of notes is also useful.

Microsoft Word and OpenOffice extensions place a toolbar in your word-processing program, from which you can select a source to cite (footnotes and endnotes are generally supported) or insert a bibliography. In my experience, the OpenOffice extension was slightly buggy, and messed up the usage of Ibid, but it was usable.

Zotero can also create a nifty timeline showing the distribution of your sources.

The next version of Zotero is planned to use a server where users can store their sources; if this were made social like del.icio.us, it would be another great development for the research process. Overall, Zotero is by far the easiest to use and most powerful (and certainly most suited for my needs) bibliography manager I have used.