I was recently introduced to Zotero. The best way to describe Zotero is to allow it to describe itself:
“Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.”
Zotero saves the articles collected, especially those from primary sources, and even helps put the works cited list together in its proper format. There is a bit of getting use to using the program because it is new; but once you get the handle on the situation it becomes almost second nature. It is well worth the effort to learn, especially since it is free and is much easier than trying to create an APA citation from memory.
There are plugins for Zotero that allows it to work with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, which I have downloaded so I could play around with all the features that Zotero has to offer. It is a pleasant move from the now antiquated approach to note cards and also allows more freedom for solid internet research. I have since used Zotero for other things and find it very useful.
There are other items I have used for research including Diigo. Diigo is a little more user friendly for general research and can be used with tablets and various browsers. However, you might have to put a little more effort into the APA works cited page.
