I like sharing reusable text I come up with. In this case, part of setting up research infrastructure for my lab includes getting everyone into a citation management system and giving us a way to share reading notes. I don't have anything against EndNote or Mendeley (and may someday switch, if massive advantages become apparent), but this email is written for Zotero.

Hi, folks – you should have invitations to create Zotero accounts. The only action item you need to take now is following that link and creating an account, which should take a few minutes. You can safely ignore the rest of this email right now, but read on if you want more information/context.

Zotero is a reference management system. It’s useful for keeping track of reading notes and bibliographic information (which we’ll need for our references section every time we write a paper). Other systems include Endnote and Mendeley; there’s no huge advantage of one over the other, but Zotero is (1) familiar to the librarians at RIT and (2) something I already have a lot of notes in, so I’m starting us out with this.

Zotero is free and open source. When you create an account, you’ll probably be prompted to download and install the Zotero browser extension. I prefer to use the standalone desktop software, but that’s your choice.

Right now, the group library is empty. That will change as I begin writing the literature reviews for our ASEE papers. Feel free to add any citations of your own, and/or to start your own individual Zotero libraries (mine is huge; as I find things in it that may be useful to CAT as a whole, I will copy them into the group folder as well).

I have my own conventions for taking notes in Zotero in ways that are easy to write papers from later  – if you really want to, you can read about it here (http://blog.melchua.com/2015/01/28/how-i-use-zotero-to-take-research-reading-notes/) but I am also happy to show you my system any time we sit down to work together.

Here’s to better research infrastructure!

--Mel