I’m in the thick of my thesis research, and I wanted to share this awesome Zotero tip I ran across. (Zotero is a great, free research and reference tool. Think EndNote, but free and way better.)
Open a new Firefox window. Copy and paste this link into your Firefox address bar:
chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul
And then open Zotero in the bottom of that window. It should look like this:
Click for a full size screenshot
At the top, you have a couple of controls.
- Refresh refreshes the current view.
- The “Page” dropdown lets you choose different kinds of indexing into a document, just like when you’re using Zotero to insert a citation into a paper you’re writing.
- Citation is… lets you pick the different ways Zotero can insert a cite into a document.
- The final box is important. Make sure you choose the citation style you’re interested in viewing, or it won’t work at all.
Now you can preview citations as you’re working without having to copy and paste. Happy Researching!
This looks interesting but I’m trying to figure out why use this. What am I missing?
Some of the students in my thesis cohort who are Zotero beginners were asking for a convenient way to preview how a particular citation would look as they were entering the information. They wanted to make sure they weren’t leaving anything important out, especially for unusual source types. This is actually a tool to help develop new citation styles (CSL files) but seems to fit the bill.
Great not that makes sense. How hard it is to create new citation styles (CSL files). I mean dosen’t Zotero have all that you would need?