Zotero a must have add-on for Students

Doing research has become a tad easier with Zotero which is not only useful for students but also for everyone else who is doing research. One of the main features is the ability to save book information from sites like Amazon, libraries and newspapers. Those information can be sorted in different categories, tagged, extended with notes, edited and attachements can be added as well.

What I like is that you can add multiple sources at once which is useful if you found a good reference list of books on a website.  Zotero adds an icon on the right side of the url whenever it senses information that can be added. A click on that button automatically saves the information if one item has been found. In the case of more items a list of those items is displayed with the option to save all or some of them.

The created references can be exported which is excellent if you want to go shopping or visit your local library searching for those books or papers.

Features:

• Automatic capture of citation information from web pages
• Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
• Flexible notetaking with autosave
• Fast, as-you-type search through your materials
• Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags
• Platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services
• Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly)
• Integration with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org