WTF: More on reference manager Zotero

Dear friends,

I’ve been posting my research plan for 2015 in various medias, so that my students, or any other students in Indonesia could read it and participate. I’ve got many responses. And the following post is my comment. I’ll make the translation later on.

— In Indonesian —

Kalau anda berminat pertama yg mau saya share adalah ilmu reference manager untuk membuat daftar pustaka:

Googling software Zotero;
Download zotero dan juga add-on untuk Microsoft Word (MsW) atau LibreOffice (LO) dan Firefox (kalau anda pakai Firefox);
Googling BibTex citation info. Ini penting karena ini file yang menyimpan info identitas tiap paper, buku, peta yang kita rujuk (cite).
Untuk tutorial format video, tautan screen cast di youtube berikut sangat membantu: http://goo.gl/7QRzsc

Jadi biasakan tiap download pdf paper atau apapun, cari atau download juga BibTex citation infonya untuk “disedot” (import) dengan Zotero.

Dengan reference manager (EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero, dll), in this case we’ll be using Zotero (free and opensource), kita hanya perlu berhenti di tempat yang tepat, memilih paper yang kita cite, Daftar Pustaka (Bibliography) akan dibuat secara otomatis oleh Zotero. Mendeley is also free (but not open source), so the choice is yours.

Selain menggunakan software eksternal, anda juga bisa menggunakan fasilitas reference manager internal MsW atau LO. Outputnya sama, tapi MsW tidak bisa membuka atau import BibTex citation info, jadi anda harus memasukkan judul, penulis, dll satu-satu. Tapi masalah itu sudah diselesaikan dengan mendownload dan menginstalasi addon Zotero untuk ms word atau libreoffice. Akan muncul icon dan menu tambahan untuk menyisipkan citation di posisi yang kita inginkan.

Introduction to Zotero (pdf)

Bagi yang ingin mencoba fasilitas internal MsW atau LO, saya sudah buatkan tutorialnya empat tahun yang lalu di blog saya di FITB (http://goo.gl/QWj2At).

—-

— In English —

If you are interested, the first thing I want to share with you will be how to use reference manager to help you manage you and make citation lists. So what I need you to do are:

Googling Zotero;
Download zotero and also its add-on for Microsoft Word (MsW) or LibreOffice (LO) and its Firefox extension (kalau anda pakai Firefox). For those of you who use Chrome, in my experience, the extension is not fully working;
Googling BibTex citation info. This file stores the citation info of your papers, books, maps, or whatever that you want to cite.
You might find this video tutorial useful.

From now on, don’t forget to download the BibTex citation info after or before you download a pdf. In fact, make it as a habit. This “*.bib” file will be later on imported to Zotero.

Using a reference manager (EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero, dll), in this case we’ll be using Zotero (free and open source), all you have to do is stop whereever you need to cite, select the paper to cite, then the bibliography (reference list) will be automatically synced by Zotero. Mendeley, however, is also free (but not open source), so the choice is yours.

Instead of using external software, you have another choice to use the internal referencing facility in you word processor (WP), either MsW or LO. The output will be the same, but both WP can’t read any formats of citation info (BibTex, RIS, RefWorks, EndNote, etc). So you will need to input the info (title, author, year, etc) one by one. But that has been solved by downloading and installing Zotero add-on in to your WP. You may expect additional menus and icons from the add-on.

For those of you who wish to use or try the internal referencing facility, I provided the tutorial four years a go on my blog (http://goo.gl/QWj2At).
Or you can go to: Introduction to Zotero (pdf) or Slideshare.net