At present, I am the sole member of my immediate department using Zotero, but it is a well-regarded tool in the research community. I use Zotero to facilitate academic research projects, to collate sources and to facilitate the collection and management of sources, citations, and quotations. Zotero integrates with a wide variety of other software and web-based services to streamline academic research.
- Zotero, when paired with the Zotfile plugin, makes it incredibly easy to index sources and documents on a project-by-project basis. Users can store document files locally in a Zotero project filesystem, or merely store links to files stored elsewhere.
- Zotero plays extremely nicely with PDF documents, thanks again to the Zotfile plugin: I can highlight sections of a PDF article's text and Zotero indexes these "pull quotes" in a searchable and well-organized manner for easy extraction when it comes time to synthesize my sources into a new paper.
- Zotero automates the production of properly-formatted references (including APA, MLA, Chicago, and others), making it a breeze to create accurate and complete bibliographies.
- Zotero's library system provides a straightforward graphical user interface to manage multiple research projects and associated files, including the ability to easily add items to a project by ISBN, DOI, PMID, and arXiv IDs.
- Zotero is a free, independent open-source project, and as such, it depends on the support of its users and developer community to extend the software and address bugs. Personally, I prefer the open-source approach but some users may wish for a paid option with dedicated support.
- The Zotfile plugin is a must-have extension that turbocharges Zotero for me; however, it doesn't ship as part of Zotero, it must be installed by end-users, a process which involves .XPI files. This isn't a big deal, but it may be too much for non-technical users. It would be nice to see this functionality included in the core application.
- Zotero does take a small investment of time for even tech-savvy end-users to get into the flow -- but once that small learning curve is scaled, it is intuitive and empowering.
