If you are taking Second Year Seminar next semester, get acquainted with Zotero over the holidays. It is a *F R E E * plug-in for Firefox (recommend the beta 2.0 version).
Zotero allows you to “collect, manage, and cite” your research sources. That may not mean much now, but if you lost your paper due to a computer malfunction what would you pay to have the citations and PDFs back? It’s a universal “law” that you will lose the best paper you’ve ever written just before it is due. So, plan ahead. Get acquainted with Zotero when you have some time; begin using it for your SYS research; and your investment in time will pay off in the future.
Zotero Features
- Automatically capture citations
- Remotely back up and sync your library
- Store PDFs, images, and web pages
- Cite from within Word and OpenOffice
- Take rich-text notes in any language
- Wide variety of import/export options
- Free, open source, and extensible
- Collaborate with group libraries
- Organize with collections and tags
- Access your library from anywhere
- Automatically grab metadata for PDFs
- Use thousands of bibliographic styles
- Instantly search your PDFs and notes
- Advanced search and data mining tools
- Interface available in over 30 languages
