Zotero is a free citation management software available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems that helps you collect, organize, cite and share research sources.
Zotero can detect what type of resource you are viewing online, including articles, books, and webpages. You can then use it to find and save the full reference information.
Strengths
- Web version and desktop application allows you to cite and store citations anywhere.
- Web browser plugins for grabbing citations from the web.
- Web plugins auto detect what type of source you are looking at.
- Can take screenshots of websites to save citation information.
- Open sourced software which is always being improved.
- Can extracts citations from PDFs.
- Can be used to annotate and view PDFs.
- Active forum boards for help.
- Desktop application uses computer storage which allows the user to determine how much data they would like to store.
- User-friendly design.
- Repository of citation style formats required by various associations and journals free to download and easy to install.
Weaknesses
- Extracts citation information which may not be relevant.
- ex. email addresses, university affiliations.
- Grabs database tags which can result in messy organization.
- As of February 2022, web storage is limited to 300 MB - Paid options allow you to increase these limits.
For more information, please see links below!
