Zotero

Etymology

The name "Zotero" is loosely derived from an Albanian verb meaning "to master".

Features

Zotero shows an icon when a resource (book, article, thesis) is being viewed on many websites (such as library catalogs, PubMed, Google Scholar, Google Books, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and publisher's websites). Clicking this icon saves the full reference information to the Zotero library. Zotero can also save a copy of the webpage, or, in the case of academic articles, a copy of the full text PDF. Users can then add notes, tags, attachments, and their own metadata.

Items are organized through a drag-and-drop iTunes-like interface, and can be searched.

Selections of the local reference library data can later be exported as formatted bibliographies. Furthermore, all entries including bibliographic information and user-created rich-text memos of the selected articles can be summarized into an HTML report.

Citation formatting

Zotero users can generate citations and bibliographies through word processor plugins, or directly in Zotero, using Citation Style Language styles. The house styles of most academic journals are available in Zotero, and the bibliography can be reformatted with a few clicks. Zotero also allows users to create their own customized citation styles.

Zotero can import and export citations from/to many formats, including Wikipedia Citation Templates, BibTeX, BibLateX, RefWorks, MODS, COinS, Citation Style Language/JSON, refer/BibIX, RIS, TEI, several flavours of RDF, Evernote, and EndNote. Given a choice of several formats, you should prefer RIS as the import option.

Annotation and mobile devices

Zotero can associate notes with bibliographic items. It can annotate PDFs and sync them with a mobile PDF reader through the Zotfile plugin.

Language support

Zotero supports more than thirty languages as of 2014.

Product support

Zotero has no dedicated customer support service, but the Zotero website provides extensive information, including instructional screencasts, troubleshooting tips, a list of known issues, and user forums. Questions and issues raised in the forums are answered quickly, with users and developers suggesting solutions.

Many academic institutions provide Zotero tutorials to their members.

Translators

Zotero uses 'translators' – short pieces of computer code, or scripts – written by volunteers, to understand the structure of web pages and to parse them into citations using its internal formats. These open-source scripts may be used by third party tools also, for example Wikipedia's 'Citoid' citation generator.

Financial support and awards

Development of Zotero has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as user donations.

Zotero has won awards from PC Magazine, Northwestern University's CiteFest competition, and the American Political Science Association.

Zotero 1.0

The first release of Zotero, 1.0.0b2.r1, was made available in October 2006 as an add-on for the Firefox web browser. Development of Zotero 1.0.x continued until May 2009, when Zotero 1.0.10 was released.

EndNote lawsuit

In 2008, Thomson Reuters sued the Commonwealth of Virginia and George Mason University, based on the claim that Zotero's developers had, in violation of the EndNote EULA, reverse-engineered EndNote and provided Zotero with the ability to convert EndNote's proprietary .ens styles into Citation Style Language (CSL) styles. George Mason University responded that they would not renew their site license for EndNote and that "anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction". The journal Nature editorialized that "the virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating. Imagine if Microsoft Word or Excel files could be opened and saved only in these proprietary formats, for example. It would be impossible for OpenOffice and other such software to read and save these files using open standards—as they can legally do."

The case was dismissed on June 4, 2009 due to a lack of jurisdiction. Although the Virginia Supreme Court granted an appeal to Thomson Reuters in this case on December 18, 2009, the appeal was withdrawn on January 11, 2011.

Zotero 2.0

Zotero 2.0, released in February 2010, added online features like metadata and file syncing and group libraries, and included a license change from the Educational Community License to GPLv3. Development of Zotero 2.0.x continued until October 2010, when Zotero 2.0.9 was released.

Zotero 2.1

Zotero 2.1, released in March 2011, adds CSL 1.0 support, Firefox 4 compatibility (the minimum is Firefox 3.6), and Zotero Commons, through which materials can be uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Zotero Standalone

Zotero Standalone, first released in January 2011, allows Zotero to be run as an independent program outside Firefox. Using XULRunner, Zotero Standalone is available for Windows, Linux and macOS. Connectors are available to integrate Zotero Standalone into the web browsers Safari and Chrome.

Zotero 3.0

Zotero 3.0, released in January 2012, includes the stable release of Zotero Standalone as well as several new major features, including overhauled Word and LibreOffice integration and duplicate detection. Version 3.0 also introduced the Zotero bookmarklet for iOS browsers, Android browser, Chrome for Android, Firefox mobile, and Opera mobile allowing uses to save reference data to their Zotero library when using mobile devices.

Zotero 4.0

Zotero 4.0, released in April 2013, includes new features such as automatic journal abbreviations, direct downloading of PDFs to Zotero Standalone from the Zotero Firefox plugin, a single save button on the Zotero browser plugin (which combines the functionality of the address bar icon and the “Create Web Page Item from Current Page” button), colored tags, and on-demand file syncing.