After a period of quite intense writing and editing, I happened to notice on 28 January this year that there were 10,001 items in my Zotero database. I had started using Zotero on 2 May 2009, now fifteen years ago. That works out at an average of about 670 items added per year.  As I type this, there are over 10,200 items. I need to weed out some incomplete and duplicate items, but I reckon I must by now have passed the milestone of 10,000.

I have used Zotero intensively. More than half of the items were accumulated as I was working on my doorstop of a book, in which I used material not only from library and information science, but also from economics, history, politics, sociology, management sciences, development studies, and more. Of these some 2000 were cited in the Bibliography.

For the last six years I have been writing a column called “Global Gleanings” for LIASA-in-Touch, the newsletter of the Library and Information Association of South Africa. (I also post the columns on this blog.) It offers a selection of news, views and snippets from the international literature of books, libraries, and information. Of course, I continue to accumulate many items as I work on conference presentations and journal articles.

Managing this material has been greatly facilitated by Zotero, a free and open-source reference management system which can be used with various web browsers. For me one great advantage is that I am no longer tied into using the proprietary reference management software used by my university.  I have Zotero on my laptop and it is synched to Zotero’s online storage space. (The first 300 MB are free, but nowadays I need more, paying $20 per year for 2 GB.)

Bibliographic data can be added manually, but mostly it can be downloaded automatically from websites or by entering an ISBN or DOI. Documents in PDF format and snapshots of websites can be downloaded at the same time. Searching is intuitive. It is possible to do simple or Boolean searches on multiple fields, in both cases using natural language. When I need to insert a citation and compile a list of references, I can choose between any of the 2,680 unique citation styles listed in the Zotero Style Repository as of today. More are being added constantly, and users can add their own styles or tweak existing ones using the SCL (Citation Style Language) tool. It’s a bit tricky, but even I managed to modify a style, by adding the “Abstract” field to the bog-standard Chicago 17^th edition Author-Date style.

As a matter of interest, there are currently 1,292 author-date styles. Why? They are available in various languages, but also because so many journal editors, editorial boards, publishers and institutions insist on specifying their own fiddly variants.  (In an earlier post I referred to this as “Citation Cirrhosis”.)

There are many other features, concisely set out in this Wikipedia entry. Zotero does not have a support office, but support is provided on its online forum.  Questions are answered promptly by users and developers, who continuous update the system. A major update, Zotero 7, was released in August 2024.

Many university libraries encourage students to use Zotero, and offer libguides to help them set it up and use it. Here is one from Harvard University’s library. Pace Mr Trump, if it’s good enough for Harvard, it’s good enough for me.