Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Zotero, a convenient referencing tool

Referencing is almost an art when writing an academic paper. As scholars all over the world continuously contribute to the accumulation of human knowledge, you always have a lot to read before producing your own contribution. Managing and mentionning the reading list is a cumbersome but unavoidable task in the process.
There are many softwares to make the task easy but Zotero is one of a kind. It has some nice time and typing saving features.

1. Zotero collects bibliographical information automatically from library or bookstore sites. You don't need to worry about typing in titles of books and author names which often have difficult spellings. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work well for non English bibliography. However, it does record the site that the bibliographical information is collected, so it's still useful for bibliographical collection in other languages.

2. Zotero saves the information collected and you can search your huge booklist with ease. You can even link your bibliography to your e-documents in hard disk. Thus you can search and read your pdf almost instantly.

3. Zotero exports your bibliography to your academic paper in official referencing format. You don't need to worry about typing them all!

The only shortcoming is that the program is not standalone. You should execute Firefox first to use it and my Firefox seems somewhat unstable after installing Zotero.

Zotero Home
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