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Zotero () is a
free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
reference management software Reference management software, citation management software, or bibliographic management software is software for scholars and authors to use for recording and utilising bibliographic citations (references) as well as managing project references ...
to manage bibliographic data and related research materials, such as
PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems ...
files. Features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies, an integrated PDF reader and note editor, as well as integration with the word processors
Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...
,
LibreOffice Writer LibreOffice Writer is the free and open-source word processor and desktop publishing component of the LibreOffice software package and is a fork of OpenOffice.org Writer. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word and Corel's WordPerfe ...
, and
Google Docs Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google, which also includes: Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep. Goo ...
. It was originally created at the
Center for History and New Media Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), formerly the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), is a research center specializing in history and information technology at George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax County, Virginia ...
at
George Mason University George Mason University (George Mason, Mason, or GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia with an independent City of Fairfax, Virginia postal address in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. The university was origi ...
, and, as of 2021, is developed by the non-profit Corporation for Digital Scholarship.


Etymology

The name "Zotero" is loosely derived from the Albanian verb ''zotëroj'', meaning "to master".


Features

When the Zotero Connector extension is installed in a compatible web browser, a special icon appears in the browser toolbar when a catalog entry or a resource (book, article, thesis) is being viewed on many websites (such as library catalogs or databases like
PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the ...
,
Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes pe ...
,
Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical ...
,
Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...
, Wikipedia, and publishers' websites). Clicking this icon saves reference information to the Zotero library. Such functionality is made possible by 'translators' – short pieces of computer code, or scripts to understand the structure of web pages and to parse them into citations using its internal formats. For mobile devices or browsers that do not support the Zotero Connector extension a
bookmarklet A bookmarklet is a bookmark stored in a web browser that contains JavaScript commands that add new features to the browser. They are stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page. Bookmarklets are usually smal ...
is available. 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 Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
. Items are organized through a drag-and-drop 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. Zotero users can generate citations and bibliographies through word processor plugins, or directly in Zotero, using
Citation Style Language The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies. Reference management programs using CSL include Zotero, Mendeley and Papers. The Pandoc lightweight document conversion ...
styles. The house styles of most
academic journals An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...
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 or to many formats, including Wikipedia Citation Templates,
BibTeX BibTeX is reference management software for formatting lists of references. The BibTeX tool is typically used together with the LaTeX document preparation system. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The name is a portmanteau ...
,
BibLateX Biber is a bibliography information processing program that works in conjunction with the LaTeX package BibLaTeX and offers full Unicode support. Biber is a widely used replacement for the BibTeX software. Both generate a bibliography in LaTeX, b ...
,
RefWorks RefWorks is a web-based commercial reference management software package. It is produced by Ex Libris, a ProQuest company. RefWorks LLC was founded in 2001 as a partnership between Earl B. Beutler (development and customer service) and Cambridg ...
, MODS,
COinS A coin is a small, flat (usually depending on the country or value), round piece of metal or plastic used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. They are standardized in weight, and produced in large quantities at a mint in order to ...
,
Citation Style Language The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies. Reference management programs using CSL include Zotero, Mendeley and Papers. The Pandoc lightweight document conversion ...
/
JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other se ...
, refer/ BibIX, RIS, TEI, several flavours of RDF,
Evernote Evernote is a note-taking and task management application. It is developed by the Evernote Corporation, headquartered in Redwood City, California. It is intended for archiving and creating notes in which photos, audio and saved web content can ...
, and
EndNote A note is a string of text placed at the bottom of a page in a book or document or at the end of a chapter, volume, or the whole text. The note can provide an author's comments on the main text or citations of a reference work in support of the ...
. Zotero can associate notes with bibliographic items. It can annotate PDFs and synchronize them with any of its desktop apps and its iOS app. As of 2022, Zotero supports more than forty languages (some of them not totally translated) . Zotero has no institutional 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. Most citation style and translator codes are written by volunteers from the community and, as
open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
scripts, may be used by third party tools as well, for example Wikipedia's 'Citoid' citation generator.


Extensions, plugins, related applications


Extensions


Cita

When using the Cita plugin, first released in 2021, Zotero supports automated retrieval and sharing of citation network data from and to external sources, and local citation network visualization. This further integrates Zotero to the
Initiative for Open Citations The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is a project launched publicly in April 2017, that describes itself as: "a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of ...
ecosystem, including OpenCitations and
Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license. ...
.


ZotFile

PDFs (or other files) can be synchronized from Zotero to other mobile apps through the ZotFile plugin.


Juris-M

Juris-M is a fork of Zotero with additional features supporting legal research and multilingual citations. It allows for multilingual citations, and translations and transliterations of citation fields and provides additional support for needs of scholars in fields of law. It was created by Frank Bennett, an associate professor of comparative law at
Nagoya University , abbreviated to or NU, is a Japanese national research university located in Chikusa-ku, Nagoya. It was the seventh Imperial University in Japan, one of the first five Designated National University and selected as a Top Type university of ...
, who continues to maintain it. Amongst the legal citation styles supported are the American
Bluebook ''The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation'' is a style guide that prescribes the most widely used legal citation system in the United States. It is taught and used at a majority of U.S. law schools and is also used in a majority of federal ...
style, the UK OSCOLA style, and the Canadian McGill style. Many other European and Commonwealth jurisdictions are also supported.


Mobile apps

Zotero mobile apps are available for iOS (iPad and iPhone) and for Android tablets and phones. The iOS app is developed by the creators of the Zotero desktop app and was released in March 2022. An Android app by Zotero is also under development.


Web library

Synchronizing a library to zotero.org allows users to access and edit the library in the "web library" interface from any current web browser, including the mobile version of the website on a tablet or mobile phone. Users can save new references to the web library using its "magic wand" button.


ZoteroBib

In May 2018, Zotero's creators launched the
web-based A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...
bibliography tool ZoteroBib (zbib.org), where users can generate bibliographies on the web without installing Zotero or creating a Zotero account.


Financial support and awards

Development of Zotero has been funded by the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pitts ...
, the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is an American philanthropic nonprofit organization. It was established in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of General Motors. The Sloan Foundation makes grants to support o ...
, and the
Institute of Museum and Library Services The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent agency of the United States federal government established in 1996. It is the main source of federal support for libraries and museums within the United States, having the mis ...
, as well as user donations. Zotero has won awards from
PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and have continued to the present d ...
,
Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Chart ...
's CiteFest competition, and the
American Political Science Association The American Political Science Association (APSA) is a professional association of political science students and scholars in the United States. Founded in 1903 in the Tilton Memorial Library (now Tilton Hall) of Tulane University in New Orleans, ...
.


History

The first release of Zotero, 1.0.0b2.r1, was made available in October 2006 as an add-on for the
Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
web browser. Development of Zotero 1.0.x continued until May 2009, when Zotero 1.0.10 was released. In 2008,
Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at the Bay Adelaide Centre. Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corpora ...
sued the Commonwealth of
Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth are ...
and
George Mason University George Mason University (George Mason, Mason, or GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia with an independent City of Fairfax, Virginia postal address in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. The university was origi ...
, based on the claim that Zotero's developers had, in violation of the EndNote
EULA An end-user license agreement or EULA () is a legal contract between a software supplier and a customer or end-user, generally made available to the customer via a retailer acting as an intermediary. A EULA specifies in detail the rights and restr ...
, reverse-engineered
EndNote A note is a string of text placed at the bottom of a page in a book or document or at the end of a chapter, volume, or the whole text. The note can provide an author's comments on the main text or citations of a reference work in support of the ...
and provided Zotero with the ability to convert EndNote's proprietary .ens styles into
Citation Style Language The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies. Reference management programs using CSL include Zotero, Mendeley and Papers. The Pandoc lightweight document conversion ...
(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 Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are p ...
'' editorialized that "the virtues of
interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader defi ...
and easy
data sharing Data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research available to other investigators. Many funding agencies, institutions, and publication venues have policies regarding data sharing because transparency and openness are consid ...
among researchers are worth restating. Imagine if
Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...
or
Excel ExCeL London (an abbreviation for Exhibition Centre London) is an exhibition centre, international convention centre and former hospital in the Custom House, Newham, Custom House area of London Borough of Newham, Newham, East London. It is sit ...
files could be opened and saved only in these proprietary formats, for example. It would be impossible for
OpenOffice OpenOffice or open office may refer to: Computing Software * OpenOffice.org (OOo), a discontinued open-source office software suite, originally based on StarOffice * Apache OpenOffice (AOO), a derivative of OOo by the Apache Software Foundation, ...
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 The Supreme Court of Virginia is the highest court in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It primarily hears direct appeals in civil cases from the trial-level city and county circuit courts, as well as the criminal law, family law and administrativ ...
granted an appeal to Thomson Reuters in this case on December 18, 2009, the appeal was withdrawn on January 11, 2011. Zotero 2.0, released in February 2010, added online features such as metadata and file syncing and group libraries, and included a license change from the Educational Community License to
GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
. Development of Zotero 2.0.x continued until October 2010, when Zotero 2.0.9 was released. 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 The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
. Zotero Standalone, first released in January 2011, allowed Zotero to be run as an independent program outside Firefox. Using
XULRunner XULRunner is a discontinued, packaged version of the Mozilla platform to enable standalone desktop application development using XUL, developed by Mozilla. It replaced the ''Gecko Runtime Environment'', a stalled project with a similar purpose. T ...
, Zotero Standalone was made available for Windows,
Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which in ...
, and . Browser connectors were available to use Zotero Standalone with the web browsers Safari and Chrome. Zotero 3.0, released in January 2012, includes the stable release of Zotero Standalone as well as several new major features, including overhauled
Word A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ...
and
LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite cons ...
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, 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. Zotero 5.0, released in July 2017, did away with the Firefox plugin, replacing it with a Firefox connector for the new standalone product, which was now simply branded as the Zotero app. This move was the result of Mozilla discontinuing its powerful extension framework on which Zotero for Firefox was based. The Zotero Connectors for Chrome and Safari were also revamped, and given additional features. A point update also introduced a new PDF recognizer, using a Zotero-designed web service that doesn't rely on Google Scholar, to retrieve metadata for PDF files. In October 2018, automatic PDF file retrieval, until then limited to directly saving from original web sources, was expanded to include open-access PDF files available at
Unpaywall OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization which creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data (to the extent allowed by ...
, and integration with word processors was extended to include Google Docs through the Firefox and Chrome connectors. In June 2019, as the result of a collaboration with
Retraction Watch Retraction Watch is a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers and on related topics. The blog was launched in August 2010 and is produced by science writers Ivan Oransky (Former Vice President, Editorial ''Medscape'') and Adam Mar ...
, Zotero started flagging retracted publications in its app, and warns users who try to cite retracted articles. With the release of version 6.0, Zotero added an integrated PDF viewer and annotation functionality, in addition to a new note editor. An iOS app was also released.


See also

*
Comparison of reference management software The following tables compare notable reference management software. The comparison includes older applications that may no longer be supported, as well as actively-maintained software. General In the "notes" section, there is a difference betwe ...
*
Citation Style Language The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies. Reference management programs using CSL include Zotero, Mendeley and Papers. The Pandoc lightweight document conversion ...
(CSL) *
CiteProc CiteProc is the generic name for programs that produce formatted bibliographies and citations based on the metadata of the cited objects and the formatting instructions provided by Citation Style Language (CSL) styles. The first CiteProc implemen ...
* LibX * ScrapBook – A Firefox extension having similar capture features, but no bibliographic functions *
unAPI According to its website, an unAPI is: The unAPI specification is only two pages long. Server-side applications which use unAPI * Bebop * Evergreen * Koha * refbase * WordPressbr>(via a plugin)* VITAL, digital repository * invenio digit ...


References


Further reading

* Covers both Zotero standalone and the now obsolete (version 4.x) Firefox plugin version, as noted in review:


External links

* {{Authority control 2006 software Free and open-source software Free reference management software Library 2.0 Linux software Macintosh software Software that uses XUL Software using the GNU AGPL license Unsigned free Firefox WebExtensions Windows software