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This paper aims to describe a new application of Zotero, a citation management system, for embedded librarianship and assessment. It explores student reception of this approach and maps Zotero’s capacities to represent citations to learning outcomes and information literacy frames that instruction librarians assess.

The librarian worked with a course using Zotero group libraries for collaborative work, used Zotero to communicate with students and assess their information literacy skills and surveyed the students to determine their perception of librarian participation via Zotero.

Using Zotero’s features made it possible to formatively and summatively assess student work quickly, and students were receptive to librarian participation via Zotero.

This suggests that librarians facing difficulty embedding in online courses or those seeking to assess student work may wish to explore Zotero as a sustainable solution to both challenges.

This paper posits a solution to common challenges for online embedded librarianship and suggests a new technique for assessing student information literacy in a context that supports information literacy.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight how the open‐source bibliographic management program Zotero harnesses Web 2.0 features to make library resources more accessible to casual users without sacrificing advanced features. This reduces the barriers understanding library resources and provides additional functionality when organizing information resources.

The paper reviews select aspects of the program to illustrate how it can be used by patrons and information professionals, and why information professionals should be aware of it.

Zotero has some limitations, but succeeds in meeting the information management needs of a wide variety of users, particularly users who use online resources.

This paper is of interest to information professionals seeking free software that can make managing bibliographic information easier for themselves and their patrons.

The purpose of this paper is to compare four popular academic social networking sites (ASNSs), namely, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley and Zotero.

Evaluation method has been used with the help of checklist covering various features of ASNSs. A structured checklist has been prepared to compare four popular ASNSs, comprising 198 dichotomous questions divided into 12 broad categories.

The study found that performance of ASNSs using the latest features and services is not up to the mark, and none of the site is rated as “Excellent”. The sites lack in incorporation of session filters; output features; privacy settings and text display; and search and browsing fields. Availability of bibilographic features and general features is poor in these sites. Further, altmetrics and analytics features are not incorporated properly. User interface of the sites need to improve to draw researchers to use them. The study report reveals that ResearchGate scored the highest, 61.1 per cent points, and was ranked “above average”, followed by Academia.edu with 48.0 per cent and Mendeley with 43.9 per cent are ranked “average”. However, the Zotero (38.9 per cent) was ranked “below average”.

Accreditation agencies can identify suitable sites in the evaluation of institutions’ research output. Further, students and faculty members can choose the site suiting their needs. Library and information science professionals can use the checklist to impart training to the academic community which can help fostering research and development activities.

The study identifies features that ought to be available in a model ASNS. These features are categorized into 12 broad categories. The findings can also be used by developers of the sites to enhance functionalities. Institutions can choose suitable sites while collaborating with other institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an automatic metadata extraction and retrieval system to extract bibliographical information from digital academic documents in portable document formats (PDFs).

The authors use PDFBox to extract text and font size information, a rule-based method to identify titles, and an Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to extract the titles and authors. Finally, the extracted titles and authors (possibly incorrect or incomplete) are sent as query strings to digital libraries (e.g. ACM, IEEE, CiteSeerX, SDOS, and Google Scholar) to retrieve the rest of metadata.

Four experiments are conducted to examine the feasibility of the proposed system. The first experiment compares two different HMM models: multi-state model and one state model (the proposed model). The result shows that one state model can have a comparable performance with multi-state model, but is more suitable to deal with real-world unknown states. The second experiment shows that our proposed model (without the aid of online query) can achieve as good performance as other researcher's model on Cora paper header dataset. In the third experiment the paper examines the performance of our system on a small dataset of 43 real PDF research papers. The result shows that our proposed system (with online query) can perform pretty well on bibliographical data extraction and even outperform the free citation management tool Zotero 3.0. Finally, the paper conducts the fourth experiment with a larger dataset of 103 papers to compare our system with Zotero 4.0. The result shows that our system significantly outperforms Zotero 4.0. The feasibility of the proposed model is thus justified.

For academic implication, the system is unique in two folds: first, the system only uses Cora header set for HMM training, without using other tagged datasets or gazetteers resources, which means the system is light and scalable. Second, the system is workable and can be applied to extracting metadata of real-world PDF files. The extracted bibliographical data can then be imported into citation software such as endnote or refworks to increase researchers’ productivity.

For practical implication, the system can outperform the existing tool, Zotero v4.0. This provides practitioners good chances to develop similar products in real applications; though it might require some knowledge about HMM implementation.

The HMM implementation is not novel. What is innovative is that it actually combines two HMM models. The main model is adapted from Freitag and Mccallum (1999) and the authors add word features of the Nymble HMM (Bikel et al, 1997) to it. The system is workable even without manually tagging the datasets before training the model (the authors just use cora dataset to train and test on real-world PDF papers), as this is significantly different from what other works have done so far. The experimental results have shown sufficient evidence about the feasibility of our proposed method in this aspect.

As the number of citation management tools including Refworks and EndNote increased in recent years, academic libraries struggle to remain on top of new developments and support all of the tools used by their users. This paper seeks to address these issues.

A librarian at the University of Illinois surveyed graduate students and faculty about which tools they use, reasons for tool adoption, features that influence adoption, and support they expect from their library.

The results highlight that many users still use older tools including EndNote and RefWorks, but do have interests for and reasons to use new tools including Zotero and Mendeley and may not need as much library support as librarians believe.

This is the first research paper on citation management use and can influence what products libraries use and the support they offer.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of students' library‐research difficulties, especially difficulties rooted in technology, to describe how the BiblioBouts information literacy game helps students overcome these difficulties, and to discuss how BiblioBouts has evolved in order to reduce students' difficulties with the technology of the library‐research process.

Data collection was multi‐modal involving quantitative instruments such as questionnaires and logs of students' game‐play activity and qualitative involving game diaries that students voluntarily completed after time they played the game, focus group interviews with students who played and did not play the game, and personal interviews with instructors before and after their students played the game.

The technology underlying the library research process is difficult to use. BiblioBouts helps students overcome their difficulties. BiblioBouts continues to evolve to enable students to reduce their difficulties with this technology.

Playing BiblioBouts gives students exposure to searching library databases but game play per se does not focus on searching.

Students benefit from playing BiblioBouts. They gain first‐hand experience and practice with library‐research technologies such as the library portal for database selection, library databases for quality information, and Zotero for citation management. They are exposed to more sources than they would have found on their own and a logical, methodical process for evaluating the sources they find.

Online social gaming has been enlisted to transform library research from a solitary activity into a collaborative activity where students document their research activities and share in the research trail that individual game players leave behind.

The research underlines gaming's effectiveness for teaching incoming undergraduate students information literacy skills and concepts.

The purpose of this study was to determine faculty preferences and attitudes regarding reference management software (RMS) to improve the library’s support and training programs.

A short, online survey was emailed to approximately 272 faculty.

Survey results indicated that multiple RMS were in use, with faculty preferring Zotero over the library-supported RefWorks. More than 40 per cent did not use any RMS.

The relatively short length of the survey precluded a more detailed investigation of faculty attitudes. The 20 per cent response rate, although typical of surveys of this type, may over-represent those faculty who have strong attitudes toward RMS. These findings support the necessity of doing more research to establish the parameters of the RMS environment among faculty, with implications for support, instruction and outreach at the institutional level.

Surveys should be conducted to establish local faculty RMS usage and preferences, as they may differ from both published findings and local expectations. Because it is unlikely that faculty will overwhelmingly use one RMS, libraries should plan to support multiple RMS.

This study is among the first to investigate the issue of RMS faculty preferences in a liberal arts setting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a general set of criteria that can be used by librarians and information professionals for the evaluation of citation management tools.

Collection development practices found in the library world are combined with software selection criteria from the corporate sector and applied to the citation management environment. A discussion of these practices identifies general criteria, or best practices, that can be used in the evaluation of various types of citation management tools.

Eight criteria are discussed. Key questions are raised that can assist librarians and information professionals in the evaluation process. Additional resources that may assist with evaluation efforts are highlighted, where applicable.

Existing attempts to evaluate citation management tools have employed an approach centering on the features and functionality of a limited set of tools. While effective, these studies neglect new developments in the citation management environment, run the risk of missing other criteria that may be important to both users and libraries, and have short life‐cycles due to the mutable nature of software updates. This study explores the larger environment in which these tools operate, and develops a macro‐assessment of the field, not tied to update schedules or specific software options.

This study aims to review the current level of service and support provided for the bibliographic management applications, EndNote and RefWorks providing research libraries with a baseline for benchmarking their support of these tools.

The 111 web sites of the Association for Research Libraries (ARL) academic libraries were systematically reviewed in 2009 for any information provided on the support for bibliographic management applications. This information was recorded and examined by type of library, US publicly supported college or university, US private college or university, or Canadian college or university.

The majority of ARL libraries provide support for one or more of these applications with the largest percentage, 42 percent, providing support for both applications. The US privately supported colleges and universities were more likely to have licensed an application and to provide support for both applications. A large percentage of libraries provide instruction on the supported application and instructional materials. The libraries supporting RefWorks were more likely to use the instructional materials provided by RefWorks where more libraries produced supporting materials for EndNote in‐house.

Examples of extemporary libraries supporting EndNote, RefWorks and both applications are provided along with other information to aid in the design and or development of support for bibliographic management applications.

This is the first large academic library study examining the overall support provided for these important and widely supported applications designed to work with library resources to aid in the research process.