Many of you on Twitter know I’ve been working on a 20 page research paper for one of my graduate classes. Before I started, I discovered a fantastic tool for building your bibliography of sources: Zotero.

This extension for Firefox allows you to build a bibliography from sites you visit. Certain scholarly sites are even integrated into the extension so that relevant bibliographical information is filled in automatically. Visit a WorldCat page for a book you’re using, and a small icon will appear in the location bar. Click on it, and you get an automatically formatted bibliographic entry! You can collect all your sources this way, and then generate bibliographies in various formats. If this wasn’t cool enough, you can tag and organize your sources however you like, and even “capture” web pages for offline viewing. You can then attach as many text notes to your sources as you like, and tag those, too.

I know this sounds almost too good to be true, for you scholarly researchers out there, but it gets even better. A companion OpenOffice.org extension is available that adds a special Zotero tool bar. With it you can insert pre-formatted footnotes and bibliographies from your Zotero source list. Talk about a time saver!

The only thing that could make this little gem any better would be more robust page saving features (may the ability to follow links a couple levels deep), and perhaps some more options for formatting notes.

If you’re still in school, or writing any documents that require you to keep careful tabs on sources and notes, you owe it to yourself to give this extension a shot. And don’t worry about learning to use it; the official website has several fantastic screencasts that clearly explain how to get stuff done.

For saving pages and making notes directly on the webpage, I won’t be giving up Scrapbook…but for organizing sources and making notes for a scholarly paper? It doesn’t get much better than Zotero.

Zotero Official Site

Filed under: Firefox, OpenOffice.Org, Note Taking