Zotero to the rescue!

One of my major lifelines to other librarians is a local consortium of health science librarians. We meet every few months and often bring in wonderful classes from the National Library of Medicine. When not taking formal classes, we teach each other. Last week I learned about Zotero- a free, open source citation manager (like End Note) that works directly in your browser. Right now, it is only Firefox compatible, but they will be releasing a version for IE, and other browsers soon.

http://www.zotero.org

It works as a citation manager, but also as a really comprehensive bookmarking system. A few of its virtues: you can archive PDFs and Web pages, you can share collections of research sources with others (great for collaborative projects), export nice looking reports of resources, and import/manage citations in Word.

It can pull details out of just about anything- PubMed, Amazon, newspapers, google books, to name a few. Obviously, I am just learning about this, but have downloaded the extension to start using while I pull research, cull resources for requests, and find items of interest as I browse. I already want to upgrade to the new Beta version! Zotero has really good documentation on their website, so I'm confident I can find my way around.

Happy citing!