Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool that will make your life a whole lot easier.

Zotero is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that allows you to quickly collect, manage and cite your research resources. With one-click you can download citation information for books from BearCat, Amazon, or another library catalog, articles from a large number of the databases the Baylor Library subscribes to, like Jstor, Academic Search Complete, Science Direct or IEEE (for starters!). You can also collect citation information for newspapers, videos from YouTube, pictures from Flickr, or even archive web pages that you have found for your research.

After you download your citations, you can manage them with categories or tags; sort them by title, author or date added; and search for your resources using an iTunes like interface right in your web browser.

And if that’s not enough to send you into fits of joy, you can also drag and drop your resources into Microsoft Word, or any other word processing program (Google Docs, your email, etc.) to automatically format the resource into the proper citation style format – MLA, APA, Chicago (there are literally thousands to choose from with Zotero!) You can also download word processor plugins to seamlessly integrate your Zotero library with Microsoft Word or Open Office to format in-text citations and generate a bibliography when you are writing papers.

Check out this screencast which will introduce you to all the great features of Zotero:

If you’d like to learn more, you can check out the Baylor Library research guide on Zotero, or come to one of the introductory workshops at the library in the next few weeks.

Workshop times:

  • Thursday, January 27, 4-5 pm
  • Wednesday, February 2, 3:30-4:30 pm
  • Tuesday, February 8, 4-5 pm

Sign up for the workshop time of your choice here.