You should be using Zotero

Assuming that everyone else is, like me, constantly going down the research rabbit-hole and finding stuff that’s interesting but not applicable – and then a week later knowing you had something for this but you can’t find it anymore: Zotero to the rescue.

Zotero is a light weight, free, research source management tool, available for multiple platforms. I use it with a Google Chrome add-on, Zotero Connector (also available for Safari and Firefox). When I’m on a page I want to save, I just click a button and Zotero saves it to the folder I was last using – I can change the folder or add tags as I do it, but it defaults to the last folder and no tags.

If it’s a live webpage, the software will store a link and an html file. If it’s a PDF, the software will download it and, if it can, distill the metadata for you. It’s not always great at that, and is better at traditionally-formatted journal articles, for example, than NGO reports – but you can correct and edit the information as well.

My favourite, favourite part is that you can sync across devices. You can sync just the metadata, or you can actually sync the documents themselves. A free account comes with 300 MB storage, but more can be purchased. There are other ways to sync documents, which I haven’t yet tried.

Zotero can create bibliographies using programmed citation styles, and McGill Guide, 7th ed. is one of the available styles. I don’t use that function much. I’m also not using the collaborative research functions, but there are some.

In any event, I’ve been using it for a few months and it has saved my several hours’ frustration trying to track something down. Four and half out of five gavels or whatever symbol we should use for legal stuff.