Over on Hastac, Cathy Davidson sings the praises of Zotero. It's a free bibliographical research tool that works with the Firefox browser. I've been using it for several months now and I can recommend it very highly. There's a nice Youtube exposition of its benefits here:
I second that, and am using Zotero for my thesis work. The Word plugin (and Zotero's current data model) leaves a few of the more complicated types of citations undoable at the moment, but for the bread and butter (article, book, chapter) it's great. It's far easier to get information into Zotero than any competitor. And the development is progressing very fast. For what it's worth you can have a look at my rather longish post on using Zotero with the SBL style. It's intended to start discussion on what scholars in Biblical Studies and kindred disciplines might need in terms of citations.
ReplyDeleteFrom reading Scot's post, it sounds as though there are a number of things that Endnote does better than Zotero at the moment. It sounds as though in order to get footnotes that give a full citation for the first instance of a reference as well as citing the full reference in the bibliography, you have to do quite a bit of fiddling, whereas Endnote does this automatically once you have it set up correctly. I know that Zotero is free and Endnote isn't, but my institution pays for a site license for Endnote, and provides it free to staff and graduate students, so functionality is the issue for me. Am I right in thinking that Endnote still has significantly higher functionality than Zotero?
ReplyDeleteJudy: I guess this is a rather late reply, but to answer your question ... not really. In some areas, Zotero is way beyond Endnote. In the area of citation formatting, it is only behind Endnote in the number of available styles. That will be resolved.
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