Zotero

Thought I'd take this oppourtunity to share Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) with y'all, as a number of the research group have asked me about it individually before now.

Zotero is a citation index manager, kind of like endnote. It works as a plug-in to the firefox web browser (i.e. it won't work on internet explorer). It has a few rather nifty features:

• It's totally free
• Downloading the 2.0 beta version lets you sync your citation index on the web... this is the cloud computing thing Soi mentioned. You have one central store of references which syncs from any computer.
  
• You can create notes, annotations and attach relevant documents (such as pdfs of the papers) very easily.
• You can add key words to the entries to help with searching through them when you get a big library.
  
• A lot of the main journal search engines (google scholar, web of science etc.) will create an entire citation with just one click.

I've found it really useful not having to copy and paste my list of references onto a USB stick and carry them around to use on any computer.

One important thing to note is that while you can access Zotero from any web based computer, you'll need to have firefox with the zotero plugin installed on each of them. A second disclaimer is that if you go for the cloud computing 2.0 version, then Zotero advise you to back it up occasionally, as it is still a beta version and may have the occasional bug. If you're very paranoid about such things, go for the totally stable 1.0 version (but then you're missing out on a very cool feature!)

If you're interested then check out the Zotero page for a demonstration of how it works. Any general questions, ask me and I'll try to answer.