Tuesday October 31, 2006

Mozilla Firefox extension for citation management

Carol Vreeland, NCSU Librarian for Life Sciences, forwarded me this link about Zotero, a new extension for managing citations through the Mozilla Firefox 2.0 web browser. Zotero is still in beta development and definitely has limited capabilities. Most noticeable and unfortunate is that it does not  yet work with NCSU Libraries' Endeca-powered online catalog. But I thought Zotero was still well worth mentioning because it already does some interesting and useful things.

When Zotero is enabled in your browser, it identifies citations on the webpages you visit and signals you with a small icon in the location bar at the end of the url. Clicking this icon opens Zotero in the bottom half of your screen and automatically adds the cite to any Library you create. This feature seems to work very well in Google Scholar, and also inside some of NCSU's general/multi-purpose databases such as Ebsco's Academic Search Premier and JSTOR.

As you're surfing the web, you can also manually add citations to your library with a few clicks and some text entry. You can also add webpage snapshots, full-text documents, and presonalized notes to your entries. All your Library documents are available both online and offline.

Zotero allows you to import records - a workaround for NCSU Endeca users - and it can export in several formats. It also has the ability to generate a bibliography with items that you highlight, formatting them in either APA, MLA, or Chicago style.