Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] automatically extracts and organizes bibliographic metadata for items from webpages. It is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension for collecting, managing, and citing research sources.

According to Trevor Owens, Technology Evangelist for George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, "Zotero includes the best parts of reference manager software (like EndNote®)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications and since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with other software."

Firefox version 2.0 is required to run Zotero. Once installed, go to the Zotero website, click on the Download button, and you are ready to go. Zotero places an icon in the right lower corner of the web browser status bar; click on the icon to show and hide the application's main window. An alternative approach is to add the Zotero button to the web browser toolbar by choosing View -> Toolbars -> Customize and dragging the Z icon onto the toolbar.

For more information, email nihlibrary@nih.gov or call Reference & Information Services at 301-496-1080. 

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