Jinfo Reviews Zotero - Bringing Order to Research Sources
Jinfo Blog

By Catherine Dhanjal

Abstract

Our product review of Zotero considers the benefits and risks of this open source tool designed to help you "collect, organise, cite and share" your research sources.

Item

The latest tool to come under Jinfo's inspection for product review is Zotero. This reference management and citation tool is designed to allow users to bring order to their research content, such as bibliographic data and files in formats from audio to PDF.

Open Source

Unlike some of the other products we've reviewed in this field, Zotero is open source, and accessible to all users at no cost. As reviewer Constance Ard comments, "This makes it affordable for everyone at any level of research".

She highlights its simple, iTunes-style, interface and ease of use as plus points.

Whilst Zotero is a tool more suited to individuals and small collaborative groups than enterprises, it has been designed to work with other, commercial, systems and has the ability to export notes, files, and citations to the likes of EndNote XML and RefWorks.

Now in its sixth year, this is an established product with what our reviewer describes as a "somewhat active open source community that contributes to the tool's growth and development". However, its open source nature can make it difficult to gauge the product's roadmap: whilst future enhancements such as a search API are noted as being "under development" on the site, no timeline is specified.

Feature-Rich

Considering that the tool is free, it offers a (perhaps surprising) number of features which make it attractive. However, it "does require some level of user effort to make the more robust and personalised features useful".

One of the features which caught our reviewer's attention is the possibility of organising content via a timeline. As Constance explains, "This visualisation provides access to the collection by published date. This can be changed to allow users to filter the timeline to date added or modified. The timeline is enhanced by the ability to highlight trends via keyword search."

Find Out More

For the full review, including more details on areas such as features and functions, browser compatibility and plug-ins, key advantages and limitations, read the full Product Review of Zotero.

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