Legal Research

Zotero Releases Standalone Alpha

By Simon Fodden

Zotero, that great note-taking research tool from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, has just been released in a standalone version for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Until this point, Zotero had been a plugin for the Firefox browser. The standalone version has “connectors” available to link it to Chrome and Safari browsers (IE is coming); and plugins for MSWord and OpenOffice are bundled with it.

If you’ve been hesitating to try out Zotero because of the necessary linkage to Firefox, you should give it a whirl now. There’s an online Quick Start Guide to get you going. As well, there are forums where you can find the tips and the answers you might need to become proficient.

The Zotero style repository contains various “default styles,” none of which is law-based. And though there are a few attempts to create legal citation style plugins in the “additional styles” list, none seems adequate yet. Surely it can’t be too hard a job for someone to produce a basic Canadian legal style for Zotero; citation styles for cases, statutes, journal articles and books would get us quite a distance along.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on February 15, 2011 (boomark / email).