Zotero: Automatic citation references that you don't even have to type in - automatically "sucked" into your computer

Of course if you're too lazy to format your reference citations in the required style, there are services that can automatically do that for you.

Now, if you're too lazy to even type out the entire entry for the citation data in the first place (or even too lazy just to copy and paste all the separate pieces of required data), there are services that can actually "suck in" the citation data for you - and after that, proceed to format that data in whatever accepted style you want: the whole process, automated!

I've been trying out Zotero (Firefox browser extension), which automatically tries to do that with all the items you add to its system. Sometimes this process fails and/or the so-called "metadata" are not readily available for the system to extract. So even when Zotero comes up with a blank for an item that you have and wish to add to your Zotero collection, you can just:

 1) go to one of many Zotero supported sources, such as books.google.com or Amazon.com,

 2) search and find your reference there

3) a special Zotero icon will appear in your Firefox address bar

 4) in just one click, all the separate reference citation "metadata" gets sucked into your Zotero collection for you to use later (and for Zotero to automatically style later)

Magic! All your time and effort saved... (image credit: University of Delaware Library)

The magic is done by special Zotero cloud software which they call "translators" - and there have been translators written for hundreds of sources; not just Google Books and Amazon mentioned above, but also Google Scholar, Worldcat.org, EBSCO, JSTOR, ERIC, many journal and newspaper websites, and many more.

Here is a short and simple video from the University of Pennsylvania that shows you exactly how to automatically add complete citation references to Zotero from the Firefox address bar:



(N.B. The University of Pennsylvania Biomedical Library has created a very handy series of 8 short video tutorials on Zotero with: Overview, Installation, Adding citations and items from Web Sources, Online Newspapers, Library Catalogs and Manually, Web page snapshots, Syncing.)



Then "attach" to that metadata... :

I have also since found out that Zotero is centred around the all-important citation data (virtually synonymous with Zotero "metadata").

Thus if you have a research item you want to use, that does not have the citation data in the form of "metadata" that is readily extractable by Zotero's sophisticated "translators", then the general wisdom is that it is best and easiest to get that metadata through some easy method, one of which is the method above using Google Books or Amazon or some academic research web service for which Zotero "translators" exist.

Once that metadata is saved to Zotero as an item, only then should you use the Zotero "attach" function to attach that first research item you had that originally lacked the metadata - something like attaching the rest of the body to its head!