I am currently trying to get my head back into academia mode and a real pain for a practical nuts and bolts type like me is managing the biblographic referencing required in an academic paper (there can't be anybody that enjoys this part of academic research). I am an OpenOffice user and previously have used the built in biblography function in Writer. Much better than nothing but still tedious to capture the information and then output correctly formatted, and I was finding that at least half my time was spent just managing the bibliography with much of the remainder trying to refind that quote I read somewhere but didn't keep a note of. Then along came Zotero. This free plug-in for Firefox automatically captures bibliographic data from a web page (and the plugin can extract data from a wide variety of academic and not so academic sources) and allows you to capture, catalogue and annotate the data for later use. Plugins for OpenOffice and Word make including references and quotations a drag and drop affair. It's not perfect by any means as in practice there are some limitations, not all libraries and indexes are supported - the Prism based index I use at the University of Wolverhampton isn't yet for example, neither is Emerald Insight a useful repository of IT related research papers, but "resolvers" are being added all the time and data from unsupported sources can be manually added without too much trouble. It is also important to check imported data against the book or document in question to ensure that all the details have been imported correctly (I am finding I have to manually add place of publication to books imported from Amazon).

Version 1.5 (beta) of Zotoro has a powerful feature to import a collection of pdf's. If you are doing research you may well have a large collection of pdf's on disc already and Zotero will import these and look up reference information through Google scholar. A restriction here is that Google limits the number of enquiries over time, so if you have a large number of imports do them in small batches otherwise you'll be locked out of Google scholar for a while.

Zotero claims to be the next generation research tool and so far I have no reason to doubt that. Thanks to Zotero the next few weeks of my life suddenly look a little easier.

Zotero is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and is funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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