love hearts by duncanHaving read Miss Crail's post entitled "I think I'm in love", I ran towards Zotero with open arms expecting a similar feeling. Unfortunately, we got off to a rockier start than the England football team in the World Cup. Firstly, I had to download Mozilla Firefox in order to be able to download Zotero. I think I must be one of the few troglodytes who only uses Internet Explorer for their web browsing. I have duplicated all of my bookmarks and my homepage to Firefox but now every time I open it I get an annoying message saying "Firefox is not currently set as your default browser. Would you like to make it your default browser?" No, I wouldn't, thank you very much! Once I had downloaded Zotero I wanted to add some items but I made the classic mistake of not reading the manual first. Overexcitement + overconfidence = failure.
I could find records for books in Copac and then add them as items via clicking on the handy little instruction entitled "Export this record as: Endnote, Zotero". Simples! But when I tried looking for papers on Web of Science, I hit a wall. I just couldn't figure out how to get the bibliographic details of the chosen paper into Zotero. It was then I decided the time had come to bite the bullet and look at the Quick Start Guide. I quickly found that you need to look for the icon at the end of the web address on the tool bar, one click and the item is sent to Zotero. However, not all of the papers on Web of Science seem to show this icon. Is this right or am I just being thick?
Once I had got into my stride, I tried adding articles from electronic journals and finding books on Newton, all of which worked perfectly. I also added a link to a website to one of the items and attached a PDF copy of an article to another item. The books I downloaded from Copac came with a large choice of tags which you could choose to keep or delete or add some of your own. Searching within Zotero is easy, a simple search for one keyword or phrase and a more advanced search to narrow things down.
All in all I think Zotero is an excellent way of managing a reference list. I had heard of Endnote and Mendeley but I hadn't tried them out. I will do now to see how they compare with Zotero. So it isn't love but maybe the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Ah, well, maybe I should have tempered my declarations of luuurve a bit. Zotero isn't working easily for all the databases I've tried, BUT so far it has been much easier to get refs in for my personal needs than for EndNoteWeb and Mendeley. It's just rather depressing that it is such a fiddle to drop refs in sometimes, and embarrassing to tell postgrads they should use a RMS to make their lives easier ... only none works perfectly. I haven't sworn at Zotero yet, not have I been prompted to throw my precious bottle of Green Goddess across the room so that's a big plus
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