Zotero: A bibliographic assistant to researcher

Abstract

Common mistakes such as ‘references are outdated’, ‘references not in the prescribed format’, ‘incomplete references’ and ‘volume and year are missing’ pointed out by reviewers of many journals are not diffi cult to avoid. The citations are the backbone of any article. Supporting the content of a manuscript with proper references plays an important role in its acceptance. References also help us trace the origin of a study or its methods being adopted. Hence, the accuracy of references in the manuscripts being submitted to journals is an important issue and it contributes to the quality of article. Though, there are plenty of software packages available for managing bibliographies,[1-3] they are often unaffordable by a student researcher. Hence, alternate free open access software is the need of time. In this article, a free inbuilt Firefox plugin exclusively for managing citations is discussed and recommended as it works similar to Endnote or other bibliographic managers. We describe a free Firefox[4] plugin “Zotero”[5,6] which does almost everything which a paid bibliography manager does. It is available freely and could be easily downloaded from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/ fi refox/addon/zotero/; www.zotero.org.

Keywords: Correspondence