Today, in a break from big-picture stuff, I want to post about a piece of free software. Software that is not at all unusual for academics to use. Software that has been around for almost 20 years. Random kids in your undergrad class have heard of it. Your librarian is a fan. Your colleagues in public health are teaching it to master's students on day 1. But the linguists I know (at least) typically do not use it, because they look down on Microsoft Word, and they think the purpose of Zotero is to format references in Microsoft Word.
But I am not here to be judgy about Microsoft Word. I am here to be booster-y about Zotero.
Here is what I used to do when I was learning about a topic. I would look through papers, downloading them as pdfs. I would mark up, comment, highlight the pdfs in various ways. Then, if I wanted to cite a paper, I would manually create a bibliographical record for it in my citation manager (BibDesk). If I didn't have immediate cause to cite it, then (being real here) I would just hope that I remembered it when it became relevant. (Sometimes I would write notes in a text file and hope I remembered that when it became relevant.) The notes I made I would almost certainly never see again. The pdfs themselves would usually languish in my downloads folder, which ballooned to several dozen GB in size, and generally looked sort of like this:
I normally use my own photos, but this one is by Christina Radevich on Unsplash
What Zotero does for me is:
it gives me a place to store my pdfs in an organized and searchable way—it turned a dumping ground into a library
it gives me a chance of remembering the thoughts I had when I read something: it makes my annotations on pdfs searchable and therefore findable
it saves me an annoying task: it automates almost all of my LaTeX-related record creation
Now, when I find a paper I want to read / annotate / remember, I immediately import it into Zotero, generally using the Zotero connector tool in my browser. This makes the database entry, complete with everything needed for later citation. (Sometimes, esp. for older stuff, I do need to enter some information like I used to, but this at least feeds into a database that also lets me manage pdfs and comments on them, not just cite them.) I do all of my pdf reading and annotation in the Zotero browser, which is overall a pleasant experience. When I want to find a paper, instead of searching all around my hard drive, I’m mostly looking at something like this:
So the point of this post is, basically, this, except that I discovered this well into my faculty career. I definitely wish I discovered it a lot earlier!
Specific recommendations:
import your existing .bib file into Zotero, it’s super easy
check out this advice for how to keep your .bib file updated as you add new references to your Zotero library
here’s the Zotero connector for your browser
If like past-me you’re piling things up in a digital junk heap e.g. your downloads folder, declare bankruptcy: move everything out of there into a new directory, then admire your beautiful empty folder ✨✨✨aesthetic minimalism✨✨✨ and then make a regular practice of cleaning out your downloads folder e.g. every Friday. The stuff that got evicted from that folder you work through slowly, processing it either into Zotero or the trash or whatever other place it actually belongs.
Subscribers, hi! Thanks for figuring out how to subscribe (I am sorry the page to do that keeps getting messed up), and thanks for being subscribed so that I can get closer to my dream of never looking at social media again 💃
Anyone new here, also hi! This is #4 out of 6 posts I have planned before taking a hiatus for July and August. (I’m not counting this one, which is me saying hello.) I have previously posted about the academic job market in linguistics, the point of doing a linguistics PhD, and why I think we should boycott for-profit publishers. The “archive” button on the top of the page should now be actually working 😬