Zotero, my research assistant
I’ve been working on (and off!) a large project over the last couple of months. Since it’s got a lot of detail involved, there’s been a bunch of papers to research, read and deploy onto loads of spreadsheets that help crunch the numbers for mass and enthalpy balances (and much more!).
So I was looking around for a tool to help organize my research and found this great Firefox extension called Zotero, The Next-Generation Research Tool.
Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you annotate, organize, and share the results of your research.
It’s packed with some great features which include:
- Automatic capture of citation information from web pages
- Flexible notetaking with autosave
- Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
- Formatted citation export
- And much more…
Aside from the organizing capabilities done within your own browser (Firefox in this case!), there is also the possibility of integration with Microsoft Word documents and even with blogging software such as WordPress.
Overall, this is a great extension that’s been helpful in keeping tabs on some needed (and even unneeded) research!
If you happen to give it a try, let me know what you think.
Could not resist try it…, and it rocks. It simply works the way I think. I guess I can say bye to scribbled notes all over the place.
I’m glad you also like it.
It’s pretty cool the way it organizes the info I need. And it’s all available offline even, so you can use it on the train or plane, or wherever.
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