Research

Resources We Used for This Project

Creating the Resource List

Zotero - A Personal Research Assistant Inside Your Browser

The Resources page was created with Zotero. Zotero is an easy to use Firefox(c) extension that helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Once you download it, it becomes part of your Firefox browser and lives right at the bottom panel for easy access whenever you need it. Zotero is a diverse tool that enables you to do the following:
  • Automatically capture citations
  • Back-up and sync your library remotely
  • Store PDFs, images, and web pages
  • Cite from within Word and OpenOffice
  • Take rich text notes in any language
  • Organize with collections and tags
  • Access your library from anywhere
  • Use thousands of bibliographic styles
  • Instantly search your PDFs and notes
  • Advance search and data mining tools
  • Collaborate with group libraries
It also has lots of other features that you can discover if you click  on the link above.

The Zotero Interface

This is a typical Zotero Interface. On the left there is a list of resource collections. In the middle the items of a selected collection are displayed and in the right section the details of a selected item from the middle items will be listed. It also has buttons that allow an automatic capture of web pages, images, etc into the collection. Additional buttons are available for other sources, such as book, journals, etc. You can also specify what bibliographic style you are interested in, such as The American Psychological Association (APA) or Modern Language Association (MLA) and thousands others.

In order to create the resource list on the right, I have opened my Zotero from the lower panel of my Firefox browser and at the same time had a Google Document open. From within the middle section of Zotero, I started dragging each item on the list of my resource collection to the empty Google document. The citations were automatically created using the specific bibliographic style I picked. Just like magic. This is a really great tool and saves so much time and aggravation trying to figure out how exactly to cite the resource to abide by the rules of the bibliographic style.