I got sent a link this week to Zotero - iTunes for researchers, in the form of a Firefox extension. I'm now evangelising to people about it on a daily basis. It worries me how excited I am by it. Zotero just won a 'citefest' competition - can't say it had ever occurred to me such competitions occur, but they do. Zotero won a number of challenges and came out on top overall. Having used Endnote a little, I can see why. I have even written to them in order to become a campus rep. I'm going to get a t-shirt.

Zotero is spectacular. It's open source and funded at least in part by the US state, as well as some private foundations. A pretty large team have put it together; extensions and third party stuff should be on the way. Ctrl - alt + z brings it up. Any ISI / library / amazon page I'm on (and many, many others) will offer me a little button in the address bar to stick all the citation info in. If there are a lot of references on the page, it'll offer me a folder-full and I choose which ones to add. They can be dynamically searched and foldered, as in itunes, as well as tagged. The search index includes all text and, with a PDF plug-in, that text can be indexed too. Notes can added (also searchable), and any kind of file attachment. The tags act as dynamic toggle switches. Related things can be connected. Genius.

The word plugin lets me add these references, finding them with the same dynamic search. A bibliography can be automatically created from the ones I've added. Reports can be printed, and there's even a timeline feature that lets you see the time position of all your references, e.g. by date published, and then search them dynamically.

Things I want to see: synonyms; something Drupal allows. For example, if I decide 'spontaneous order', 'invisible hand' and 'emergence' are synonyms, I want those to come up in a search of any one of them. A way of going from a mind map to a report with notes and articles created. Oh, and a 'write lit review' button.

It's also a much better way of dealing with bookmarks, since you can make notes, tag and connect to anything related. Yesterday I was making notes on a bloggingheads interview with Steve Marglin who's just written The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (just got the book too; if you have a spare 20 minutes, the first part of the video's worth watching. It gets right to some of things my PhD's about, which is nice.) I found it again with 'marg' in the itunes-like search.

So this means the end of my brief and slightly sordid love-experiment with Drupal as my PhD repository. I nabbed what I'd done so far with a quick export / import. CiB is back to being a common or garden blog, thank the Gods.

p.s. Thanks to Kev for sending the link in the first place.