Zotero Review

I just started using Zotero, a bibliographic manager software, for our Digital Tools in Qualitative Research class. (available at www.zotero.org) Previously, I had been entering citations and saving them in Word's toolbox, but have found that the functionality of that is limited. In addition, it has no capability to download citations automatically from the web. I had also tried RefWorks, a bibliographic manager provided free through OSU's library, and found it clunky and difficult to use.

I usually use Safari for my web browser, so the first step was to install Mozilla's Firefox browser, as Zotero only works with Firefox. Next, I downloaded and installed the Zotero software. It was relatively easy to use. I had to download some additional plug-ins to get Firefox to work the way I wanted, for instance to be able to view PDFs within Firefox rather than downloading and opening them separately in Acrobat.

I also had to download a plug-in for Word, so that I would be able to put my citations into a document. This was a little more tricky, but I eventually got it working.

My assessment, after using Zotero for only a week (in which I only had to format and turn in one paper with minimal citations) is that, in general, I appreciate its ease of use. I particularly like how I can capture citations from web pages, Amazon, and library search engines. One of the first things I did was pull up my order history from Amazon, where I've bought many of my textbooks, and save citations for those books into Zotero. I also did an online search for required articles for one of my courses, and tried to remember to save the citations for each one as I saved the PDFs. It will take some time before I automatically remember to save citations in Zotero when I am searching and downloading articles.

One feature I was expecting, and was disappointed to find that it did not work, was to be able to capture citations from within Carmen, OSU's course management software. Many professors post PDFs of required readings in Carmen, and I was expecting that Zotero would be able to capture these citations as well. Not so. Zotero can save web page information with the Carmen site cited, but not information about the source of the articles themselves. For this, I had to manually enter the bibliographic information.

Another major fault I found was with the automatic formatting of sources for different style guides. It appeared that, like magic, Zotero could generate correctly formatted citations. However, I discovered that with APA citation, while Zotero appears to get the information in the correct order, it does not automatically adjust for capitalization. In APA, uppercase letters are used only for the first word in a title, first word in a subtitle, and proper nouns. However, when Zotero captures information from websites, library searches, and the like, it captures the titles the way they are written, usually with all words capitalized, and does not fix this for APA. I could not find a way to work around this problem, so with many of the books I captured, I had to go in and adjust the capitalization of the titles. I see this as being a major drawback, especially when I cite the same work in papers that have to be formatted differently, such as APA for some journals but MLA or Chicago for others.

Despite these drawbacks, I plan to continue using Zotero. It is definitely easier to capture, enter, and save citations, and inserting them into Word documents is not much more difficult than with Word's own citation manager. Unlike Endnote, Zotero is free, and a new feature allows you to access your saved citations from the internet, including on mobile devices. Although I generally work from my laptop, I can see where this feature may come in handy in the future. My only wish is that I had discovered this software earlier and had all of my old citations already in it.