Zotero

Zotero is software for managing bibliographic and other reference material, usually in research contexts. It is quite an agile tool, not only for storage of references but also for generation of citations, footnotes, bibliographies and reference lists in many formats - wikipedia

While these are features that are present in most similar software, Zotero is freeware, and open-source. An alternative proprietary software (albeit with a good API), is Mendeley - mendeley.com

The other important feature of Zotero is integration, both with Firefox for storage of material, but also with word processing software for the usage of the stored material. Zotero locates metadata for an online resource, if it is available and harvests it with the resource when it is saved, thus saving a lot of labor.

Installing the zotero standalone version is a simple as going to the donload page and choosing a package for your platform - zotero.org

From this page you can also install an extension for the browser of your choice. The Chrome extension for instance will indicate when you can add page to Zotero's local database. Clicking on the extension add the web page to the currently selected folder in the Zotero standaone.

The issue of the lawsuit served against George Mason University, who created Zotero, by Thomson Reuters, owners of Endnote, which is similar propietary software. Another episode in the open standards/interoperability struggle... See also comments under Mendeley Suggest

Zotero shows an icon when a resource (book, article, thesis) is being viewed on many websites (such as library catalogs, PubMed, Google Scholar, Google Books, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and publisher's websites). Clicking this icon saves the full reference information to the Zotero library. Zotero can also save a copy of the webpage, or, in the case of academic articles, a copy of the full text PDF. Users can then add notes, tags, attachments, and their own metadata.

Selections of the local reference library data can later be exported as formatted bibliographies. Furthermore, all entries including bibliographic information and user-created rich-text memos of the selected articles can be summarized into an HTML report.

Zotero users can generate citations and bibliographies through word processor plugins, or directly in Zotero, using Citation Style Language styles. The house styles of most academic journals are available in Zotero, and the bibliography can be reformatted with a few clicks. Zotero also allows users to create their own customized citation styles.

Zotero can associate notes with bibliographic items. It can annotate PDFs and sync them with a mobile PDF reader through the Zotfile plugin - zotfile.com

Zotero uses 'translators' – short pieces of computer code, or scripts – written by volunteers, to understand the structure of web pages and to parse them into citations using its internal formats - github

Zotero translators are open-source scripts may be used by third party tools also, for example Wikipedia's Citoid citation generator - mediawiki.org