I used to use Google Notebook for research, but since they have discontinued development on it I became a little skittish about continuing to rely on it.  And then I discovered Zotero.

I am in heaven. Seriously.  All of my pdf’s of journal articles now have a home, with full bibliographic information pulled from the University’s library system.  Do a search, click an icon, full bibliography is downloaded and stored in Zotero right in my browser.  Download the PDF, create a link in zotero, and now I have all the information in one spot, easy access.  Have a note or thought to add?  Add it in Zotero. It will forever be there.

Does the article apply in more than one research area? Create separate libraries within your catalogue of data. Now the same article is present in multiple places.

Prefer to work with tags?  Not only will zotero download the tags from Eric or Ebsco, it allows you to edit them and create new tags.

Related artices?  Yup, you can forge relations outside of the libraries.

The only thing zotero does not do (yet) is allow sharing and syncing. That is in the beta 1.5 which has been released.

But the real benefit comes when you have to use the papers you collected and actually write something. Download the Word module or the Openoffice module (depending on what you use) and you can have the program pull sourcing information directly from your zotero database into your paper. Then, when you need the bibliography, click one button and bibliography shows up preformatted to whatever format you prefer.

Truly this program makes most of the research class I am taking at UNR irrelevant. We spent so much time wasting effort while talking about formatting in APA format. Yawn. The software does 95% of it for you, all you need to do is check errors in your database (like capitolized letters in the title. MLA wants, APA does not, that is a manual check you need to do).

Why can’t professors and teachers get with the times and actually USE the technology that is out there? Why are we wasting time, even at the college level, talking about formatting when the software does it?  This brings up the whole digital native / digital immigrant thing for me, and I am really tired of it.

The digital rollover occured 30 YEARS ago. If we all aren’t digital natives by now, we need to pull our collective head out of our bums and get with the 21st century.

Download Zotero (it’s free) and use Zotero.  Totally worth it.