Zotero for scholars, students, and archivists - a free tool for organizing and citing your research

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources.

• It can download articles and save them to your computer
• It let's you organize your researched articles by tag
• It will save/store media of many types
• You can add notes to any given entry
• It has a metadata search function (it can look up the reference data for many PDFs)
• If you are studying or putting together professional articles, it can autoformat the relevant citations and references
• It can be used for storing recipes or hobby data

If you like saving lots of news clippings or data from the web (especially if you are worried that it might disappear down the Memory Hole), this software is a great tool to keep track of your work.

I started using Zotero two years ago as part of my graduate studies. I had tried another citation database called EndNotes that I never really got the hang of. I tried Zotero and found it easy to learn and to use.

You can use share your Zotero database online if you'd like, but you don't have to.

Here is mine (5000+ items and adding another 1000 today - NO, I haven't read ALL this stuff, LOL):
https://www.zotero.org/stevedisme/items

My major tags (or collections of research) are COINTELPRO, domestic security, the FBI, malfeasance, rent-seeking, corruption, terrorism, cybersecurity, critical thinking, institutional bias, and the Constitution.

There are some things you can do to make maintaining your library easier:

• find a browser addon that let's you download in PDF; it saves a lot of space where Zotero will save some items in HTML
• You can add references to items that are not digital; I have items in my Zotero library that are real books sitting on my shls ( I use the tag "on shelf". and I have items that are on my Kindle

Here is a great article for using your Kindle with Zotero:
Managing Kindle Highlights and Notes in Zotero, Evernote, and OneNote

If you have a lot of digital articles on your computer, including your own writing, I can recommend this tool for you.