Zotero and Evernote Like Overleaf, Zotero is more than just a web-based reference manager. It is a free, open-source app, maintained by a very active developer community; you can use for not just bibliographic manager and reference management, but also archiving other kinds of information. Zotero has amazing search capabilities, and can help you narrow down to the needle in a haystack much more easily than you can with a freeform tool like Evernote or OneNote. I hope you give it a try, Stacey!
Zotero for Genealogy: Harnessing the Power of Your Research, by Donna Cox Baker (Golden Channel Publishing, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2019). 159 pp.
Zotero offers genealogists a powerful and versatile citation manager, an endless file cabinet, go-anywhere access to research, a flexible organizational structure, and the ability to file one thing in many places. Developed by George Mason University and used by scholars worldwide, this robust product serves research in phenomenal ways. Best of all, for all its value, Zotero is free to download.
Endnote Vs Zotero Vs Mendeley
An avid Zotero user since graduate school, author Donna Cox Baker proves it to be the perfect complement to genealogical research. Not only does it eliminate file cabinets, binders, and stacks of unfiled papers, it brings your voluminous research anywhere you have Internet access. Zotero for Genealogy teaches Zotero from installation to advance add-ons, using exercises and illustrations to enhance the learning experience. Baker teaches readers how to get the most out of Zotero and shares the various methods she has developed to maximize its value to genealogy.
What Zotero can do for a genealogist
- Eliminate paper and physical filing, replacing every file cabinet, box, and paper stack you used to think you had to have.
- Eliminate thousands of keystrokes as Zotero creates citations for you with the click of a button.
- Access your citations and notes virtually anywhere you have Wi-Fi and a computing device.
- Extract the comments you have made and the passages you have highlighted in a PDF, drawing them into Zotero without retyping.
- Find anything you have stored, with lightning-fast smart searching—even things you stored away years ago and remember only vaguely if at all.
- Replace the standard genealogy research log with something much better and more powerful.
- Build a smart to-do list that eliminates repetitive data entry and is there whenever you need it.
Table of Contents
PART I: ZOTERO GENERAL OVERVIEW
- Getting started with Zotero
- Documenting your research
- Organizing research collections
- Managing your attachments
- Searching, sorting and finding your research
PART II: ZOTERO ADD-ONS
- Zotero Connectors & instant data entry
- ZotFile & advanced PDF management
- Word processing & painless citation
Zotero Plugin
PART III: APPLYING ZOTERO TO GENEALOGY
- Organizing your filing system
- One source or many: a choice
- Working with Evidence Explained
- Creating your research to-do-list
- Efficient note-taking
- Zotero on research trips
- Collaborating with others
DO YOU HAVE YOUR COPY OF ZOTERO FOR GENEALOGY?
Zotero will maximize your family history research note-taking and organizational time, guide you in citation development, go with you wherever you travel, allow you to collaborate with others, and enable you to store or link to all sorts of file types. Jupyter markdown shortcut. Replace file cabinets, binders, albums — all the space-intensive, water- and fire-susceptible, expensive paper resources.
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Zotero Evernote
While writing my post on how I use Evernote, I considered why I chose to use it over keeping my dissertation notes organized in Zotero or DEVONthink Pro Office, the two other research managers that we’ve written about on the blog. So, the following is a brief overview of each application and reasons why you might want to use one over the other. So, if you’re trying to decide what application you might want to try out this may help you out!
DEVONthink Pro Office
Evan, our Web developer and blog contributor, swears by DEVONthink Pro Office for his dissertation research. You can read more about his thoughts on DEVONthink Pro Office by clicking on the above link to his post — but the gist is that he likes the way that tagging works with the program, its text searching and OCR (optical character recognition) capabilities, as well as its ability to handle the thousands of documents making up his personal dissertation archive.
I ultimately didn’t end up using DEVONthink Pro Office, although it sounds like a really useful program — mostly just because I’m doing a literary and film-based dissertation in American studies, and not a historical one like Evan’s. I have far less documents to deal with and don’t need such a powerful application. If I had the number of sources that Evan did (he says he has over 10,000 items!), I would probably use DEVONthink Pro Office rather than Evernote.
Zotero
Zotero’s a bit of an odd duck in this lineup — it’s not exactly a research manager in the same way that DEVONthink Pro Office and Evernote are. It’s a bibliographic manager in the first place, but within your saved sources you can take notes on them. The thing that I do like a lot about Zotero is how easy it is to collect sources once you install the browser add-on. However, I usually start using Zotero in order to make bibliographies towards the end of a project rather than using it the entire way through.
At this point in my own dissertation research, I don’t think I’ll be using Zotero for any note-taking, since Evernote and DEVONthink Pro Office are both designed more for that purpose and are more suited for it. But, I can imagine using Zotero for projects that required heavy source-collecting (for example, a historiographic essay, literature review, or perhaps even comprehensive exams).
Evernote
Right now I’ve been using Evernote for my dissertation research. I also use it to collect other bits from around the Internet. If I had a smartphone, I’d use Evernote with that too, and collect images, as well as probably get one of the Evernote smart notebooks, since I like to take notes by hand at times. Evernote has OCR also, and athough I don’t know how it compares to DEVONthink’s OCR, it has worked well for me so far. This helps me search the documents I’ve collected. I can also easily tag the items I’ve found, take notes on them as I collect them or after I’m looking them over. This makes organizing everything easy.
When I want to collect something from my browser (like a database search that was particularly fruitful) I just click on the web clipper icon in my browser and it will be saved for me to look at later. If I have a PDF or image that I want to save in Evernote, I can create a new note and drag and drop the PDF into the window — what I’m getting at here is that it really is simple to gather research. It’s so simple that I can spend my time thinking about what I’ve collected rather than getting distracted by an overly-complicated set of steps that I’d need to take to save something in a way that would make it useful later.
It’s Really About What Works Best For You
As you can see, these three applications have similar functions, but are all designed (and optimized) for slightly different kinds of tasks. So, depending on what your particular project is, you might want to use one of the above applications over the other, or a completely different one (like Mendeley, for example, for more collaborative projects). Autocom driver download for windows. Either way, I wish you happy researching!
If you’re interested in reading about organizing your research, you might find the following posts helpful: Organizing Your Research with DEVONthink Pro Office, Five Reasons to Use Evernote for Academic Research, and Doing Academic Research with Zotero.
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