My requirements were: Manage my growing library. This means easily adding sources, organizing and searching, and easily producing bibliographies. It also needs to integrate into my current tools, which are Firefox for web browsing, OS X, and LaTeX for authoring.

The primary tool, and one I’ve been using for a few years, is BibDesk. A recent release adds a small web browser and support to grab BibTeX entries straight from Google Scholar, so with one click you have your citation. You might need to set up Google Scholar Preferences to show BibTex links. Once you have the reference, it takes a few extra steps to get a copy of the paper stored locally.

Then last week I came across Zotero. While this is just a Firefox plugin, it is better described as an entire application embedded in your web browser. It allows quick saving of pages from a variety of sources (newspapers, journals, amazon books, Google Scholar, etc.) with full reference to the source (both the web site, and the item reference such as ISBN, publication date, etc.). It will archive the page so you have a local copy for permanent and offline viewing. And it has powerful tagging and sorting and note appending features. The best way to see if it is useful for you is to watch the screencast.

Zotero can even import a BibTeX file (your BibDesk library) so you have all your current references in it, and with the zot2bib add-on it can sync with BibDesk on-the-fly. Zotero, BibDesk, and zot2bib combined make reference adding, tracking, and using extremely simple and powerful. Zotero even provides graphical views into your bibliography database. The Timeline view sorts papers by publication date, and allows filtering, keyword highlighting, etc.

Chronological view of publications (timeline) produced by Zotero.

BibDesk and Zotero are useful for creating a bibliography and managing it. Viewing and publishing requires a different tool. Citeline is an excellent way to browse through your bibliography. You can do so privately, or host it on their servers, or host it on your own server using their services. The sidebar has nice interactive searching and subsetting features, and it also supports a timeline view.

Combined, these tools have made finding, recording, and referencing papers much easier.