We are happy to announce a new screencast demoing Zotero’s Microsoft Word Plugin. This quick tour of the plugin demonstrates how to add references to documents and generate bibliographies from the growing list of bibliographic styles Zotero supports.

The Word plugin offers a powerful way to integrate your Zotero collection with your writing process, but it is worth noting that it is only one of many ways to do so. Zotero’s OpenOffice plugin offers similar functionality for OpenOffice users—check out Daniel de Byl’s screencast to see this plugin in action—and our Google Docs screencast demonstrates the power of dragging and dropping references into any text field. Each of these features and plugins bring us closer to our goal of seamlessly integrating your Zotero collection with the tools you use to write, compose and communicate.

One of the exciting new features in our most recent release is compatibility with the Flock browser. We previously blogged about Zotero and Netscape, but Flock integration brings a distinct flavor to the Zotero experience.

Watch this brief screencast to see the synergistic way Flock connects your Zotero collection with its media tool-bar and web clipboard to seamlessly add bibliographic content to blogs, forums, and web documents.

The latest version of Zotero, 1.0.0rc3, integrates MIT’s SIMILE Timeline widget, allowing you to generate timelines in a single click from any collection or saved search. Watch this screencast to see how it works.

We are excited to announce the launch of Zotero 1.0 Release Candidate 2. This release adds many new features.

Zotero now offers full-text indexing of PDFs, adding your archived PDFs to the searchable text in your collection.

Zotero’s integration with word processing tools has been greatly improved. The MS Word plugin works much more seamlessly and we now support OpenOffice on Windows, Mac (in the form of NeoOffice), and Linux.

Zotero is also now better integrated with the desktop. Users can drag files from their desktop into their Zotero collection and can also drag attachments out of their Zotero collection onto their desktop.

We have begun to add tools to browse and visualize Zotero collections in new ways. Using MIT’s SIMILE Timeline widget, Zotero can now generate timelines from any collection or selected items.

The new version of CSL (Citation Style Language), used by Zotero to format references into specific styles, is more human readable and easier to edit. We will be adding many more styles soon.

Users should also notice some performance enhancements. Zotero now runs smoother on Windows and Linux.

Stay tuned for more detailed information on these developments. We will post more documentation and screencasts about these features in the next few weeks. We have also added support for a host of additional web resources:

Research Databases
ARTFL Encyclopédie
OpticsInfoBase
Institute of Physics
RSC Publishing

News
The Economist
Time
The Age
The Australian
New Zealand Herald
Sydney Morning Herald
stuff.co.nz

Genealogy
Ancestry.com

Cooking
Epicurious.com

For a more exhaustive look at Zotero’s new features and bug fixes see the full changelog.

We are launching a new series of screencasts demonstrating how Zotero enhances other online tools and services. The first screencast demonstrates how Zotero can act as a citation system for Google’s suite of tools, connecting their research repositories with their web applications. Take a look and see how easy it is to automatically capture bibliographic information from sites like Google Books and Google Scholar and simply drag and drop formated references into Google Docs.