Zotero is an open source citation and bibliography manager. The project has been managed by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM), and supported by the Andrew Melon Foundation and other donors. There are several alternative citation managers, including the popular but pricey commercial product Endnote, owned by Thomson Reuters, the publishing giant that was created in 2008 by a merger of Thomson and Reuters.* The Zotero product has been around for a few years, steadily adding features, improving performance, and attracting users. It now offers what is referred to as cloud computing, allowing users to sync libraries to Zotero servers and share and collaborate with other researchers. The increased functionality and features of Zotero are part of a larger movement to enhance the accessibility and usability of text resources on the web. Not only do tools like Zotero make it easier to obtain, organize, validate and share meta data about books, articles and other documents and files, but they give users an editorial role in tagging and annotating data. The value of the databases is largely due to the work of the users who spend hours collecting, organizing, validating and annotating citations. Open source alternatives like Zotero are designed to avoid lock-in, barriers to innovation and monopolistic control over bibliographic resources and standards.
An introductory how-to discussion of using Zotero is available in Using Zotero.
*At one point, Thomson Reuters sued George Mason University, litigating the right of GMU to reverse engineer the file formats used by Endnote. The lawsuit was dismissed in early June, and unless Thomson Reuters appeals Zotero is free to offer the ability to use data in Endnote file formats.