ReadWriteWeb

If I were to make a list of must-have tech tools for scholars and students, Zotero would certainly be on it. Zotero is a free, open-source research management tool that helps you gather, organize and analyze your sources.

Once upon a time, we academics wrote down bibliographic details on note cards and the like, and cursed when we couldn't recall which journal or hadn't recorded which page we'd found that excellent quotation. (Not to mention the cursing as we assembled our citations and bibliographies). Research and writing has, of course, changed, and Zotero is one tool that recognizes that much research nowadays occurs in the web-browser.

Zotero, the popular open-source research, bookmarking, and bibliography tool, just released version 2.0 of its Firefox plugin, which, among other things, adds support for sharing libraries with groups. With this new version, users can now easily collaborate in groups and create group libraries. While these new functions are obviously available in Zotero's Firefox plugin, the most interesting changes have happened on Zotero's website, where groups can now create private and public sites to share their collections.