If you have not yet tried the free, open source citation managing software, Zotero, last night’s announcement should be enough to push you over the edge to give it a go – especially if you were put off by the fact that it works as a plugin for the Firefox browser.

Zotero Everywhere, announced last night, means that Zotero can now be will soon be able to be used with Chrome, IE and Safari or as a standalone desktop client. UPDATE: Thanks to Owen Stephens for pointing out that these developments are slated to happen “soon”.

Why should you try Zotero ?

• It costs no money. You are not dependent on your employee-provided site licence to let you access it, so if you leave – like graduate or change sectors – you do not suddenly start having to pay to keep accessing your citations.
• Upgrades are free, easy and painless.
• It harvests metadata from journal articles, webpages, Flickr images, YouTube videos with one click and stores them in an easily searchable database where you can tag, annote and create collections
• It works with content behind paywalls as well as free and open content
• It stores a snapshot of the saved item – webpage, pdf, whatever, and then THE CONTENTS of that item is indexed and searchable as well as the reference
• You can drag and drop citations from your library into a wordprocessor, blog post, slide show and instantly have correctly formatted citations
• Using the WORD plugin, you can insert an in-text citation with one click, and then press the “create bibliography” button and it harvests all your citations and creates a complete reference list
• It comes with several citation formats and you can specify the output if what you want is not there
• You can synchronise your citations to the web. This feature saved my vegetarian bacon when the harddisk of my laptop died two weeks before I had to hand in my Masters thesis. Instead of panicking, I just plugged in my netbook, synced my Zotero library to my browser and continued on.
• You can share citations publicly and with groups
• Because if we all band together and support these kinds of tools and help them to grow and be better, then we are responsibly saving our organisations money and getting closer to giving our users what will work best for them.

If you want to look at my favourite how-to guide, check out the Zotero Research LibGuide from Jason Puckett at Georgia State University – the man who is writing the book on Zotero – literally. I look forward to reading it but I guess he is busy writing a new chapter right now 🙂

Here’s a hoky little screencast that Kate Freedman and I made about Zotero , Thing 13 : Zotero: Webcam Conversation, for the Murdoch University Library Web 2.0 Easier, Faster Friendlier program in 2009.

UPDATE: If you want to know how Zotero compares to EndNote and Refworks, check out the table created by the University of Wisconsin – Madison or, of course, the Wikipedia entry on Comparison of Reference Management Software .