By Praveen Vaidya Literature management with Zotero

Preview Managing the literature What is Zotero? And its features Application of Zotero in literature management Limitations of Zotero Conclusion

Managing the literature During the research process, bound to gather a mound of literature May include reference materials, books, journals, grey literature, official publications etc. Needs efficient reading skills to allow you to cull unwanted literature You have to find a way to manage or organise Should be able to annotate, cite and understand relevancy Should be able to retrieve quickly and efficiently

What is Zotero? [zoh-TAIR-oh] A research tool for managing online references by George Mason University, Virginia A Firefox extension that provides users with automated access to bibliographic information for resources viewed online. Can be downloaded from website ‘Stand alone’ version Add on can be downloaded from Firefox browser When installed, icon appears on side bar “Senses” the bibliographic information contained in a website

What is Zotero? 2 When the user clicks the Zotero icon-gathers that information and places it on the user’s library of resources Helps to gather the information quickly and easily Later researcher can review and cite sources Has a feature of adding records manually also Hence, researcher has a centralized location of gathering and storing references This, streamlines the research process At this stage, Zotero can sense information of many of prominent websites

What is Zotero? 3 Provision to create subject folders sub folders and tags Search feature from any of the key words found in the saved literature Can take a snap shot of the website referred Suppose, if website is not compatible with Zotero, data can be entered manually Organises resources on timeline Users can choose citation format, such as APA, Chicago, MLA etc Can export citations to MS Word or Google docs

Limitation of Zotero Does not work with Internet Explorer as IE is proprietary nature of the browser, but can install ‘standalone’ on Windows OS Tied to only specific computer you are using. To use it on other computer, installation of browser and Zotero add on is essential Online access to information is made available in new versions of Zotero, but if you want to switch to another computer, user has to export-import the data Does not provide an easy method to share the information with others

Conclusion Today, quantity of online data has skyrocketed and research takes place at ever increasing pace By automating the tasks of gathering, managing, citing online references, Zotero or other online reference tools facilitate more efficient research process Formatting of citation is consistent, and typos and other mistakes common in manual reference system can be eliminated By and large, literature management affords to be systematic

References O’Leary, Zina (2010) The essential guide to doing your research project. Sage, New Delhi pp71-83 Busha, Charles and Harter, Stephen, P (1980) Research methods in librarianship. California, Academic Press disseminating-research/social-media-guide-researchers disseminating-research/social-media-guide-researchers

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