Zotero

Zotero is software helping you to:

Store your academic papers (.pdf, .djvu, etc) in an orderly manner
Manage your papers by storing them in (possibly multiple) collections
Add tags and sticky notes to papers
Display all the necessary metadata (journal name, publication year, etc)
Gather all this metadata from websites for you (arXiv, Elsevier, etc) in one click
Effortlessly create bibliography files for TeX, BibTeX, etc

A quick view of Zotero

Left column: A list of collections (which look like folders). Center column: A list of papers within my "Historical papers" collection. Right column: More details about one paper.

What it looks like to use Zotero

Browsing across your papers and opening one

Every document can be stored in a "collection", which makes it easy to find. By clicking on a document, it opens the attached file (here a .pdf).

Using the search bar to find a paper

You can search based on the title or the authors.

Getting a paper from arXiv

Thanks to the Zotero plugin, you can directly download a paper in one-click into your database. The .pdf will be stored locally on your computer, the metadata will be automatically downloaded. You can, if you want, store your pdfs in a shared folder (like Dropbox or google Drive) and have Zotero installed on many of your computers.

Getting a paper from other places, like Google Scholar

It works on most academic websites, like arXiv, Google Scholar, or any official journal website (provided you have access to it). We'll see later what to do when you have access to the metadata only, but not the document itself.

Exporting one or a group of paper citations to the paperboard

Since Zotero automatically downloads and stores the metadata of your articles, it can also generate bibliographical data, in a lot of formats (here the bibtex format).

In the following we are going to see how to install and set up Zotero on your computer, and explain in more details its main features.