I have to read a lot of papers for work, and every once in awhile I write one of my own. Keeping track of all the papers and then citing them and building bibliographies can be pretty time consuming. Citation managers make the job a lot easier. I’ve been using RefWorks for the past year, but recently switched to Zotero after reading about it at Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist.

Zotero is much faster and easier to use.  The integration with Firefox is flawless and importing references is effortless.  For databases without automatic RefWorks export options for their citations, I had to download a citation file, then import it into RefWorks in a separate (tricky) step.  I say tricky because I had to choose several options on the import that were different for different databases and often not very intuitive.  This doesn’t happen with Zotero.

The biggest problem I have with Zotero is that it doesn’t work with Microsoft Office 2008 yet.  So I’m using both RefWorks and Zotero until the new plugin gets built.  Hopefully that will be soon.  I’m excited about not using clunky RefWorks anymore.