Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Zotero -- Really gotta use it!

Previously, I suggested Zotero is an excellent tool for managing and sharing bibliographic records. As I made the suggestion just after I learned about the site, I was commenting only on what I thought the potential was; recently, I have been trying to polish up a writing project and so have a growing bibliography... when it is done, I expect around 100 sources.

I have been managing the bibliography with Zotero. When writing, I have my word processor with the reference section open in a file and I have Firefox with the Zotero plug in installed. I add references to Zotero with the ISBN or DOI and wait a few second for the information to be loaded into Zotero, then drag the icon for the source from Firefox onto the task bar and into the reference file, and move the drop text cursor to the correct spot in the list and drop it.

I do notice about 20% of the entries have some error... maybe listing only one of several authors is the most common error I have noticed. Most of the sources I am using for my project are also being added to a group I started... check it out:

http://www.zotero.org/groups/21st_century_schools

1 comment:

  1. Feel free to post data quality issues to the Zotero forums (http://forums.zotero.org) and we'll look into whether anything can be done to improve them. Unfortunately, Zotero is usually limited to whatever metadata is provided by library catalogs and such, so you often need to go looking for reliable catalogs. For ISBN lookups, I'd recommend using the Library of Congress catalog. For DOIs, post to the forum with any DOIs with missing data-- that shouldn't happen, and it's usually a fault on the publisher's side that they need to be notified of.

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