Zotero is a free and open-source bibliographic management application for managing and organizing documents, and facilitating source citation in research.
If you are someone who likes to learn and is always trying to do so, you probably have a huge list of references and pending PDF files to read. From there, it’s difficult to know what you’ve read and what you haven’t, and to organize them by topics or tags. This is where Zotero can be of great help.
Zotero is one of the most popular tools among academics and students for managing their bibliographies and collaborating on research projects, due to its ease of use and the many features it offers.
The Zotero interface is simple and clear, and quite easy to use. Although, personally, I also think it could be improved and updated a bit.
On the left, we have a tree of “virtual” folders (not physical), which we can create in a nested way to organize our documents.
In our collections, we can add our documents. In each element we create, we can add one or several attached documents. These attachments can be files that are physically on our computer or URL addresses. In addition, we can add custom tags, notes, or related items.
We also have a built-in PDF reader, where we can add notes or highlight fragments. Very useful for recording the interesting parts of the documents.
Another utility of Zotero is to keep the list of references of a document, and automatically create citation documents. Very interesting when creating content, and to correctly give recognition.
On the other hand, the program has a synchronization tool that allows access to documents and notes from any Internet-connected device. For this, we only have to create a free account. The synchronization result is generally quite good.
In addition, the application has a large community of users and a large number of online resources that can help beginners get the most out of the tool.
We can also improve the behavior through extensions. Some of the most useful ones are the following,
- https://github.com/windingwind/zotero-tag
- https://github.com/wshanks/Zutilo
- https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-folder-import
- https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile
- https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-storage-scanner
- https://github.com/windingwind/zotero-better-notes
Zotero is a very interesting tool for managing our document library. It is free and available at https://www.zotero.org/