Meet ZoteroBib

ZoteroBib

Librarians love citations

It’s no secret that the Graduate Center librarians love Zotero, the open-source citation manager that is created by academics, for academics. We teach workshops at the library and in classroom visits, and find a zillion other ways to evangelize about the time and effort saved by integrating it into your scholarly workflow.

Which means we’re thrilled about the announcement of ZoteroBib, a free service to quickly create properly formatted bibliographies without creating an account or installing any software.

 

There are lots of citation managers out there, but Zotero’s strength has always been that it integrates right into your web browser, where so many of us are actually doing our research. It captures citations on the fly so that you can keep working, secure in the knowledge that when you need to refer back to that book/article/blog post the information was saved, fully recorded and ready for your bibliography.

But what if you just need a quick list of formatted citations, like a Works Cited list for that conference proposal you drafted in Google docs? That’s where ZoteroBib comes to the rescue. Just find the item online (the article in JSTOR, the newspaper article, whatever), copy the URL and paste it into ZoteroBib’s search bar. It also takes DOIs, ISBNs, PubMed IDs, and other identifiers. The service will return a formatted citation according to the style guide of your choice, and will allow you to build (and save, and share) a fully formatted bibliography. No account necessary, and no marketing or ads to clutter up your research space.

Want to know more about how it works? Check out their quick demo.

Is this replacing Zotero?

No. You’ll still want to use the full software package to collect and organize citations for your research projects. Use ZoteroBib for one-off bibliographies or to quickly share a formatted list of citations.

And the best part?*

ZoteroBib and Zotero were created with the philosophy that your research data belongs to you and should be kept secure and private by default.

That’s right, no sharing your data with third parties here.

 

* OK, the best part is getting properly formatted bibliographies with the click of a button. But second-best just doesn’t sound as good.

About the Author

Roxanne Shirazi is assistant professor and dissertation research librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she also serves as project director for the CUNY Digital History Archive and oversees the college’s institutional archives.