I use RefWorks, which is an online application, but I think you mean to ask about apps that organize and save content we find online, content that hasn’t been published via the standard scholarly means. In that case, yes, I’ve used Zotero (especially while in library school and writing lots of papers) and found it very useful for saving “snapshots” or URLs of things I wanted to come back to later. The snapshots were locally saved so I’d have a static version of the page and could use it even when offline. I don’t think Zotero can automatically create/format a reference for the items you’ve saved — maybe someday if everything is written in XML that will be possible, or maybe it does have that function now and I never knew.
I use Zotero and recommend it for cash-strapped libraries. It’s a Firefox plug-in and has a widget for use with Word to create bibliographies and to create citation lists. It can save citation info and keywords information from PubMed and a few other sites, and can also save your own notes about those resources; and all of that information is searchable and sortable. If you come across a site for which Zotero cannot save the citation information because it is not formatted in a way that the software can recognize, you can write to both the webmaster and to the Zotero developers. One thing I wish Zotero would come up with is cloud-computing; currently, if you want to use your library on more than one computer, you have to copy and import it into the other computer; it would be nice if you could just go to a site where your citations are stored to access them, like the files on dropbox.com.
I use RefWorks, which is an online application, but I think you mean to ask about apps that organize and save content we find online, content that hasn’t been published via the standard scholarly means. In that case, yes, I’ve used Zotero (especially while in library school and writing lots of papers) and found it very useful for saving “snapshots” or URLs of things I wanted to come back to later. The snapshots were locally saved so I’d have a static version of the page and could use it even when offline. I don’t think Zotero can automatically create/format a reference for the items you’ve saved — maybe someday if everything is written in XML that will be possible, or maybe it does have that function now and I never knew.
Here’s the Zotero website http://www.zotero.org/ — it does appear to have citation creation capability
I’m a RefWorks user, too. I gave Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/ a test drive and was very impressed. It’s desktop software to organize your pdfs, a Word plugin to format citations, and a web-based social networking platform. More at TechCrunch: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/mendeley-the-last-fm-of-research-could-be-world%E2%80%99s-largest-online-research-paper-database-by-early-2010/
I use Zotero and recommend it for cash-strapped libraries. It’s a Firefox plug-in and has a widget for use with Word to create bibliographies and to create citation lists. It can save citation info and keywords information from PubMed and a few other sites, and can also save your own notes about those resources; and all of that information is searchable and sortable. If you come across a site for which Zotero cannot save the citation information because it is not formatted in a way that the software can recognize, you can write to both the webmaster and to the Zotero developers. One thing I wish Zotero would come up with is cloud-computing; currently, if you want to use your library on more than one computer, you have to copy and import it into the other computer; it would be nice if you could just go to a site where your citations are stored to access them, like the files on dropbox.com.
Rachel, you should try the 2.0 beta version, it does exactly what you describe.