Citation Management

I have been using Zotero, off and on, for several years now. I looked at EndNote Web briefly, and it seems to be fairly similar in what it can do. The fact that I do not use it regularly for my own work suggests that I have not yet seen it to be that useful, for reasons I'll get back to later. I have found it most useful when I am teaching research methods courses to my history students.

The good: Many students really like it to collect the documentation on the sources they find. I like that I can create a group library and thereby keep track of their research progress (to an extent, anyway). I have done two courses that focused on local history, and we have created group libraries, arranged topically, of locally available sources on Chautauqua County history. Another professor in my department, working with one of the librarians, created a Zotero library of local history sources on campus, to which classes such as mine can add. Thus, the campus will have a database of local history sources. Finally, Zotero is relatively easy to use, and I love the option of being able to easily import Web pages, article links, etc.; many of these have a little icon that you can click on to automatically add it to your library. You can get a plug-in for Word that enables it to create notes and bibliographies for documents. I love that the library is both online and easily accessible at the bottom of your browser screen; I believe they have made it accessible on other browsers now, although it used to be just Firefox.

The bad: Zotero can be a bit clunky to use, and unless one uses it regularly, it is easy to forget the basics. The navigation isn't as intuitive as I'd like. One of the biggest shortcomings isn't really the fault of Zotero, but leads to problems when my students use it construct their notes and bibliography. The beauty of the program is one can just import the citation to one's document. But, as I tell my students, it is a computer and what gets put in is what will come out. So if you pull a citation from JStor and the title of the article is in all caps, that is how it will show up in the bibliography. And I will then mark it down and tell them they need to correct their citations! So I have to remind them constantly that they are responsible for cleaning up their citations. One issue that annoys me is that you cannot just "move" citations from library to library. Yes, you can move a citation, but it stays in the original spot and is just copied to the new library. So you now have it on your computer twice. And if you decide to just delete it from one of those, it deletes the citation entirely from all your libraries. So I find it difficult to organize well.

Bottom line: Despite its shortcomings, I find it most useful as a tool to assist my students when they are learning to collect, organize, and properly cite their sources. Because of its shortcomings, I do not find it particularly useful for collecting and organizing my own research sources. That said, I do find it useful as a place to collect articles and other materials that I encounter on the Internet. I can save these on Zotero and go back to check them out later. I will continue to use it sporadically for my own research, but I will also continue to use it regularly for my history research courses.

Here is a link to a group library my students made last semester in the history senior honors seminar on local history: HIST 499 Local History Zotero Library Fall 2012.