A bibliographic manager is a lifesaver in everyday school life – no matter if you are an 8th grader or working on your dissertation. It pains me to think of the hours I have wasted over the years attempting to manually track research material. I have used Excel spreadsheets, different document management software. Once you start using a reference manager all of your nightmares are forgotten.

What Is Zotero?

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a tool that helps you to collect, manage, and cite your references. Using Zotero you can attach PDFs, notes, and images to your citations, organize them into collections for different projects and create bibliographies. Zotero automatically updates itself to work with new online sources and new bibliographic styles. Zotero was built and is supported by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

My top 5 Reason to Pick Zotero

1. It’s Free
2. It’s cross-platform compatible
3. The content is all searchable
4. Supports dozens of citation formats
5. Works within your web browser.

There are dozens of bibliographic managers out there. Some of them are free, the others require paid subscriptions. Probably, the most popular two are Zotero and Mendeley. Both are free to use and make money by offering cloud storage to sync PDFs of the papers. Yet, both give some limited storage for free — Zotero gives 300MB, and Mendeley gives 2GB.

Why do I choose and recommend Zotero then? Because it’s fairly easy to set-up Zotero so that the free 300MB are only used to sync metadata (which in practice means almost infinite storage), and the PDFs are synced separately using a cloud solution of one’s choice (I use Google Drive). It’s the main set-up hack that I’m showing in this blog post. There is no similar hack for Mendeley, and with them, at some point, one is bound to pay for extra storage.

Another consideration in favor of Zotero is that it’s an open-source program with strong community and outspoken commitment to stay free forever, while Mendeley is an Elsevier for-profit product. The academic community knows a lot about Elsevier in particular and for-profit products in general. As a career-long decision, I’m confident in choosing Zotero. And the project keeps developing nicely — just look at the recent Zotero blog entries on the new features such as Google Docs integration, Unpaywall integration and a new web service for quick citations.