Z is for Zotero

I want to give a workshop to students about keeping things organized while doing research. I want to target this to undergraduates. I spent much of the day looking at EndNote Web that we now get for "free" with our Web of Science database. More on that in another post.

I'm beginning to realize that a citation manager isn't the tool I'm looking for. While I see that this software would be a godsend to someone who has to prepare a bibliography with hundreds of citations, I’m not finding it that useful for the kinds of research I do or that undergraduates do. It’s a lot of work on the front end to make the bibliography easier on the back end.

When I’m finding articles, books, and websites, I want a tool that’s going to keep track of that material and get me back to the full text quickly. Sure, it would be nice if it would make nicely formed citations at the end, but that’s not really what I’m thinking about when I’m in the midst of the research—and I’m guessing it’s not what undergraduates are thinking about until the night before the paper is due. So, it would be a hard sell to get them to learn and use EndNote Web as they are going along—much easier to teach them to go to the Citation Machine or find the appropriate handbook when they are ready to make their bibliography at the end.

That brings me to Zotero that does seem to be the kind of tool I would love to teach my students. Unfortunately, it only runs on Firefox 2.0 and we've been asked not to download that in the library. Of course, students can download whatever they want on their own computers. I wonder if it would be worth bringing in my laptop to do a demo?

Labels: instruction

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