Zotero
When looking at any reference manager, I inevitably end up comparing it with my tried-and-true method of bookmarking my sources in a folder on my Chrome bookmarks bar. I take notes on a word doc under the heading of the bibliographic citation for the relevant article. I’m old-school with citations (plus historians tend to be militant about citation formatting, punctuation, etc. so I’ve never trusted citation generators), and I cite them all by hand. Personally, I don’t really trust any computer program to pull the relevant information with accuracy. So, I’m weirdly set in my ways about manually citing everything, just storing it all in a Chrome bookmark folder, and taking my notes on a word doc.
So, I’m looking at Zotero with a hefty dose of skepticism. Right away I can tell that it’s easy to install/download. It looks like it would be easiest on Firefox, but because I use Chrome I have to download “Zotero Standalone” and install the Chrome extension, which isn’t difficult. I was able to get a free account, which made me wonder how exactly they make money, and if offering free accounts hurts their ability to provide user support. I poked around on some product reviews and found my answer from Benjamin Plotkin, a Technical Project Manager at California State University (so I’m assuming that this information is legitimate). He wrote, “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.”[1] This makes me think that Zotero would be most useful for students because it’s free and because I tend to think of college students as being pretty tech-savvy, so they may not need as much user support. I wonder if university faculty generally have the option to use high-end paid reference managers for free through their institution? If so, I’d probably go for the more expensive option because I assume it’ll offer more user support, as opposed to using free Zotero.
When I’m viewing something that I want to cite, I click the Zotero icon in the top corner of my browser and it shows me a snapshot of the saved information, including the url, author, title, etc. The icon looks different depending on the type of document that I’m saving (website, article, book, etc.). After clicking around and looking at user support FAQs, I see that you can’t annotate pdfs in Zotero, though you can annotate webpages. You have to use other programs if you want to annotate directly onto a pdf. This seems a little clunky, because most journal articles appear as pdfs. Why would I bother with Zotero if I have to take my notes on a separate document (like my Word doc notes) or bother with a separate application? At that point, I might as well stick with my clunky method.
I’m a little spazzy with technology, so it took me longer to realize this than it should’ve, but I can go to Word and quickly insert my Zotero citations, which it can automatically generate/format into Chicago, APA, and MLA. In my Zotero library, I can organize my sources into collections that look like the folders on my Chrome bookmarks bar. This is handy, because I like to divide up my sources depending on which part of my paper that I’m using them for, and it looks like I can edit the title and other saved information that shows up, which I sometimes change to indicate which section of my paper I’m using the source for. It’s clunky that I edit the title to indicate parts of my paper, and I see that I can use “tags” instead, which is like adding a keyword onto the description. If I leave the title as it is and add a tag to describe that argument/section of my paper that I want to use the source for, then that looks a little more professional.
Apparently, you can also establish group libraries where you can share your work and sources. This might be handy for professors that want to put all their class materials in one place, because they could share the library with students. You can invite individual members of the group and control who gets to edit the library, which would be good for classes as well. Also, it looks like you can import libraries from Mendeley, EndNote, and LaTeX into Zotero. This kind of thing scares me little because it looks like a really involved process that requires multiple clicks, but it’s probably pretty easy for the average user (compared to whom I’m definitely less competent).[2]
Speaking of which, it’s not very easy to find answers to my questions on Zotero’s website. They answer some basic questions on the FAQ page, and I see a public forum where people can ask and answer each other’s questions, but to be honest those forums aren’t usually very helpful for me. The place where I’m seeing answers to most of my questions are actually university LibGuides, such as the ones by Georgia State, Princeton, and the university of New Mexico. As spazzy as I am with computers, I tend to have a lot of questions and require a lot of video tutorials that show me exactly how to do something. I would hesitate to use Zotero because it doesn’t look like they have much in the way of this type of user support. I would need to keep a helpful LibGuide bookmarked for me to reference with my questions. Though to be honest, Zotero is probably perfectly user-friendly for the average person, especially if we’re talking about college students. I’ve never done any type of usability study, so I probably haven’t talked about the right things, but I used the standard under the A5 directions as a guide. I also had to consult a couple of reviews and LibGuides to get information, which I’ve cited below.
Bibliography
Plotkin, Benjamin. “User Review of Zotero: Overall Satisfaction with Zotero.” Trust Radius, https://www.trustradius.com/reviews/zotero-2019-07-03-17-40-15.
“Zotero: Import Libraries.” Oregon State University LibGuides, https://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/c.php?g=359201&p=2426112.
Nichani, Mohir. “Review of Zotero, An Invaluable Reference Manager.” Medium, https://medium.com/the-information/review-of-zotero-an-invaluable-reference-manager-b81949bebc7c. [I’m not very good at coming up with criticisms/analyses of technology things because it’s all I can do to basically understand how they work (embarrassingly), so I looked at this review to tell if the average user could use Zotero easily]
[1] Benjamin Plotkin, “User Review of Zotero: Overall Satisfaction with Zotero,” Trust Radius, https://www.trustradius.com/reviews/zotero-2019-07-03-17-40-15.
[2] “Zotero: Import Libraries,” Oregon State University LibGuides, https://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/c.php?g=359201&p=2426112
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