A REVIEW OF ZOTERO AS A REFERENCE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE FOR POSTGRADUATE DISSERTATION

Abstract

Zotero as a platform for formatting references, is one of the many known reference management software tools that help researchers in selecting and recording cited material based on variety of citation styles. The paper aimed at reviewing its enormous contributions when adopted in Technical Report Write-ups. Critical review of three selected papers was made within the timeframe of 2012, 2014 and 2018 publications in academia to produce enough contributions to knowledge from the past down to present. Zotero came to discourse in 2006 by the Centre for History and New Media at the George Mason University and free to be downloaded as open source software add-on to the Firefox browser. An icon is shown in the address bar when it is installed, so that any of the thousands of supported sites like PudMed, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, and many others are browsed and cited. Its features are that References and Scholarly materials are automatically detected; Researcher can easily click to save the materials cited, the webpage, or PDFs of academic works; Keyword tagging of content is also supported. Other features are Cloud synchronization functionality – where all materials added to library is uploaded to the Zotero servers which becomes available from any web browser. The software facilitates collaboration in a shared libraries between teams of users that can be accessed privately or publicly.