Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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A group of scholars at George Mason University released a free Web-browser enhancement this month designed especially for other scholars. The project, which was originally called Firefox Scholar, is now called Zotero.
The goal is to bring search and organizational tools to humanities scholars who might not have the skill or interest to otherwise use them, by embedding them in the Web-browser software the scholars are already using, says Daniel J. Cohen, an assistant professor of history and director of research projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
With Zotero, which requires the latest version of the Firefox browser, users can import Web pages, and citation information from them, into a personal filing system, among other features. A written statement on the project's Web site says the software "includes the best parts of older reference-manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways."
Chronicle Wired Campus 10/31/06
Postscript -- (KN) --
I gave this product a try and it's great for grabbing citations from library catalogs, Amazon, Google Scholar, Google Books. So far it doesn't work on most other bibliographic indexes such as Web of Science, Pubmed, etc.
For instance with Google Scholar, Zotero will give you a view of the titles from a Google Scholar search where you can "check" off each citation that you're interested in. You can then save the ciations to an RIS file, and then import it into EndNote or Refworks. Multiple other output formats are also available, such as BibTeX, MODS, Refer/BibIX or Unmodified Dublin Core. Or you can just create a bibliography from the list in Chicago, APA, or MLA style. Looks useful, particularly for book citations.
Zotero only works with v.2 Firefox, and above.
[comments by KN]
Posted by P. Kaufman at November 1, 2006 1:12 PM
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