Save scientific bibliography the right way with Zotero
What is Zotero?
If you have to write any sort of academic document, be it a college report, a dissertation, a scientific article, whatever it may be, you will need to have bibliography. And, to have bibliography, first you need to have bibliographic entries, which you will then either write manually or use a reference management software like Zotero or Mendeley to write them automatically.
While the “main attraction” of Zotero, saving bibliography with 1-click from the browser extension, is attractive for how easy it is to use, it is not reliable. To be fair, it is an excellent starting point for collecting the metadata of a newfound article. But, if you want to create the reference from that to write your bibliography at the end of your document, you will be missing a lot of information.
Add items by identifier
An excelent and way more reliable alternative to the browser extension is using the “Add item(s) by Identifier” option in the Zotero application. In this option, by entering a document’s DOI, ISBN, ISSN, PMID or arXiv ID, that is, unique identifiers for scientific articles, books, periodic publications, PubMed entries and e-prints, respectively, Zotero will be able to accurately retrieve all metadata available for the document you desire.
For example, looking at “Principles of Data Mining” available here, instead of using the browser extension to save it as a bibliographic entry, it’s much easier to copy its DOI and enter it in Zotero:
And the same can be done for books. While you can, for example, get their BibTeX data from Google Scholar, it’s much more reliable to save them through their ISBN. For example, to save “Mining of Massive Datasets”:
Browser Extension Acknowledgement
Lastly, I just wanted to give a final acknowledgement to the browser extension.
While unique identifiers are 99% reliable for scientific documentation, for some reason you might need to save a reference to a web page, a blog post for instance. In these cases there is no other choice but to rely on the extension as it will get the job done.
