Your Free Research Tool Report – One of Many Free and Low Cost Writing Tools in the eBook “Web Word Work.”
Zotero - A Research Powerhouse:
Gmail is my primary research tool for all the reasons and power we've already discussed. However, if you're doing academic writing, or writing that requires citing references in footnotes, there's an absolutely awesome software tool that is totally free. PC Magazine voted Zotero as one of the “Best Free Software Applications of 2008.” Zotero is a free research add-on for the Firefox browser. Remember from the chapter on hardware and software tools that I strongly recommended getting the free Firefox browser and learning to use it. Adding Zotero to Firefox gives you a powerful tool to collect, manage and cite your research. It even records the bibliographic information for books, papers and other documents, allowing you to cite references as footnotes in your writing. If you use MS Word, there is an add-on for Word that integrates Zotero, allowing you to pull in bibliographic information, placing them as footnotes in your writing with a click or two. It doesn’t stop there. Zotero fully interacts with a couple of hundred websites, from the Library of Congress to the New York Times and Amazon.com. When you locate a document, book or other published item on these sites, a special icon in your browser bar allows you to add that item to your Zotero library. All available citation and bibliography information is pulled with it. When you use something from the source in an article you’re writing, it’s simple to pull the reference into a footnote right out
of Zotero. Using a folder filing system, you decide how you want to archive your research. You can place an item in more than one folder as well. If an item applies to more than one of your folders, just drag it into any that apply. You’ll likely never lose a research resource again with this system. Zotero pops up from the bottom of the browser via a button or keys [Ctrl + Alt + Z]. There are three panes side by side. 1. Folders you set up to hold your research by subject, client, or any other criteria. 2. The contents of the currently highlighted folder. 3. Detailed information about the item currently highlighted in the middle section.
There are various ways to add an item to the middle pane. If you’re on a site that is supported, like the New York Times, here is the icon you’ll see in the URL bar:
Clicking on that icon will add the page and relevant citation information right into the folder you currently have selected. If you’re looking at the information about a book, you might see an icon like this one at Amazon.com:
At the New York Public Library site, I did a search on “OFHEO’ (Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.” There were 10 titles for checkout, and the icon before I selected one looked like a folder:
This would pull up a screen like this:
I just select the titles I want in my research list and say OK. It’s that easy, and all of them are available to me in the future! Let’s look at Zotero’s right pane and see what we can do there:
Note the tabs at the top. You can add your own notes to this item, attach documents, including PDF files, and more. Note that the information available at the site for this book is in this pane. This is the information available when you pull a citation into an
article footnote. In the three pane screenshot above, you will see a search box as well. You will be amazed at the way Zotero indexes all of these entries, web page text, attachments and notes. Just start typing a key word or phrase, and results will show up in the center pane for that search. If you want all the research you’ve ever found that mentions “home price indexes”, type it in and every document that mentions that phrase will show up. You can see the power of this amazing free tool. You shouldn’t be wasting valuable creative writing time doing research more than once. You’ll also be amazed later at how you’ll use the search function and locate information you didn’t even notice in a source at the time you first found it. Perhaps you were writing an article about the most useful hand tools for the home gardener when you saved some resource material. A few months later, you could be tasked to write about sharpening hand tools. You do a search on “sharpen tools” and turn up one of the articles you had previously used for the gardening article. That’s a freebie time-wise. I’m not trying to give you detailed instructions on how to use Zotero. What I want you to see from these examples and screenshots is the power of this tool and why you should make it one of the first that you implement in your writer’s toolbox. Another reason that a tool like this one is valuable to a freelance writer is the “almost applies” bit of information. You’re researching for an article on energy-saving lighting for the office workplace. In your quest, you come across excerpts from a “green construction” book. They don’t mention lighting, but do mention construction techniques that naturally increase the brightness in the office without adding wattage. As your client is selling light bulbs, this isn’t going to be something you want in
the article. However, you never know when you might get a builder or office developer who wants some interesting blog posts on green building. With this research archival tool, you’ll have this tidbit tucked away for easy access precisely when you need it. You don’t even need to try and figure out which of your folders applies. You can have a catch-all folder, as a search later on “lighting” or “natural lighting” or “office construction” would probably turn up this gem for your next blog post. Do you travel, but tend to work while on the go? Your research files will soon become so important to you that it will be hard to write without them. I have a tablet PC, but don’t always carry it with me for security reasons, or just because it’s heavy and a pain to start up. Remember in our hardware and software chapter we talked about micro-drives, or some call them “flash drives.” They’re very small, and I had located one with 8 Gigabytes of storage for about $80 at Walmart. There are detailed instructions at the Zotero site for how to redirect all your Zotero database activity from its default file location on the hard drive to an external drive. All you have to do at the beginning is to let Zotero know that you want your research on the flash drive instead of the hard drive. Keep that drive in the USB port whenever you’re doing research with Zotero, and all of your files will be ready to throw into a pocket and used on another system anywhere you happen to be. You should be concerned about losing the data, so a backup is a must. However, we also talked about Allway Sync software in the tools chapter. I have Allway Sync continually backing up the flash drive Zotero files onto the hard drive of my computer AND onto an SD card that stays in its slot in the Tablet PC. I’m paranoid about data, and you should be as well. You don’t want to learn the hard way how it feels to lose years of research just because you dropped your flash drive overboard on dinner
cruise. You may want to say that this seems like a lot of trouble, when you can just do a Google search for whatever you're researching at the moment. That's true, but what are the results? Even if you never leave the first ten results on a Google search, a lot of them do not necessarily meet your needs. You have to go through them one by one to look for items pertinent to your current project. Remember that you did this once already, the first time you did a related article. Had you used Zotero then, you would have refined the results down to a couple of highly relevant search page destinations. Those would have been filed in the appropriate folder, and even a search on keywords would be faster in the more refined Zotero database. Also, don't forget that you may not have located what you wanted on the landing page from the search result. In other words, you may have drilled down several pages into the site before you found the perfect link to a PDF file of a document that fits your information need perfectly. Using Zotero, you've only filed away that one relevant page, with the PDF as an attachment. Instead of going through the entire procedure again the next time, you'll simply do the search in your personal research database and pop it right up. Get the Entire Ebook and Begin a Profitable Writing Career Today!
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