I just discovered the best FireFox Plugin ever! Zotero is a free all-in-one reference/bibliography manager. This one is going to be very useful to help philosophers research and write! Here are some of the highlights that will help you see how great this plugin is.
- One-click reference addition.
When you’re on a site with works that list bibliographic information – the zotero button pops up next to the URL. Click it and the information is neatly submitted to your bibliography database in the standard format - Export
You can export your database in whole (or part) to just about any standard format. You can even export it to your clipboard and paste it in a word processor file. - Styles
Zotero supports the major citation styles (Chicago, APA, MLA), and you can create your own. - Tagging
You can organize your bibliography entries with multiple tags (something very useful in philosophy where articles tend to overlap several areas) - Offline
Eventhough it’s a FireFox plugin – you can access your bibliography database when you don’t have an internet connection. - Attachments
You can easily include multiple attachments that are related to the bibliography entry from papers you’ve written about it, papers other people have written about it, or an electronic copy of the paper itself. - Notes
Take multiple notes on each entry (bye-bye 3×5 note cards – if you actually use those)
That should be enough to have you drooling. But there’s more…
- Word Processor Plugins
You can download a plugin for OpenOffice or Microsoft Word, and you’ll get a Zotero toolbar. You can use that toolbar to insert reference/footnotes/bibliographies according to the major styles and a bibliography. I’ve tried this out in OpenOffice 2.4. The plugin is buggy in the beta version of OpenOffice 3.0 – but the Zotero staff says that the next release will be OpenOffice 3.0 compliant! - Zotero 1.5 and 2.0
The future of Zotero looks to be awesome. Not only will it be OpenOffice 3.0 compliant, but Zotero will include a server side element so you can access your database online from other computers and share your databases with others. The next installment (1.5) promises syncing of the database across multiple computers.
Check out the website. They have a very short video tour that gives you a nice explanation of everything.
You are right. Having using firefox and it’s numerous extentions/add-ons for about 4 years, Zotero is in my top 2. The only other plug that I like is tabmixplus for it’s ability to restore crashed sessions, etc.
Zotero not only does one thing well, but mutliple things well. And practically no other service does as much or as well. I’ve read many comments about it’s citation feature. IMHO, that’s not the most important or most powerful, it’s the ability to capture the web page + ability to highlight, note, tag, and organize the captured page.
Before this, for researching and writing my reports, and saving webpages, I used a combination of:
1. Save webpage in IE as webarchive (firfox does NOT have this feature), and manually setting up folders.
2. Select, copy, and paste webpage into word processing software.
3. Google notebook it.
4. Using Scrapbook firefox extension
5. Evernote (have not used much)
synchronising multiple computers
there are various suggestions around for using Foldershare and a centrally synchronised database for this purpose. the upgraded Zotero hopes to sort this apparently.
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3861/syncing-with-foldershare-limit-on-number-of-files/