is, at the most basic level, a free and easy-to-use reference manager. It is designed to store, mange, and cite bibliographic references, such as books and journal articles. In Zotero, each of these references is an item. More broadly, Zotero is a powerful tool for collecting, organizing, annotating, citing, and sharing research information and sources.
Zotero was created at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in 2006.
It is now a project of the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development of software and services for researchers and cultural heritage institutions. To learn more about the people that have made Zotero possible, see Zotero Credits and Acknowledgements.
Zotero was an extension for the Firefox web browser (released in 2006) or a standalone application (released in 2011). Starting with the release of Zotero 5.0 in July 2017, Zotero for Firefox and Zotero Standalone have been replaced by a single standalone application for users of all browsers. Zotero standalone connectors are available for Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Edge that allow users to save items to Zotero directly from within the web browser.