I blog a lot about freebees these days; they are constantly on my mind as the US Dollar rises against the Nepali Rupee like David rose against Goliath. We are taking a pounding here in Nepal, so anything that saves a pound is worth looking at.
The free Zotero add-on for Firefox, along with it’s free MS Word/Open Office Integration is just that: a pound saver and super useful tool for anyone doing research on the internet and then using Word or Open Office to compile the output to create reports and papers and whatnot. As formal documents like these need citations and bibliographies, and the construction and management of them is just a pain in the butt, Zotero really shines as a free-bird star.
This is where Zotero plugs into the research process. You collect and manage your research using the Firefox plug-in:
And then when you are ready to write, you use the provided and auto-magically installed scripts to add/edit citations and create bibliographies in the required format (and some folks are so fussy about those formats it makes you want to smack them). So no more worries there. Here is what it looks like in MS Word 2008 on a Mac:
It’s simple, requires no manual, has a great support site, and best of all - it’s absolutely
FREE!
