Zotero is a nifty tool

26 Feb, 2026

This might sound crazy, but I actually enjoyed writing essays and papers in school. Genuinely.

I enjoy the process of 1) brainstorming a topic, 2) researching said topic, 3) distilling that research into something useful, 4) writing the essay, and 5) editing and editing and editing.

Not necessarily in that order.

But I enjoy it. It's, in a weird way, relaxing. I know what I'm supposed to do so I set out and do it. There's no real surprises so it's nice and steady.

I think my favorite part is the research phase. I love collecting resources. Just anything that might be even remotely useful. I love reading through it all, highlighting, taking notes, making connections, and distilling it into a workable document. However, something during this phase always clawed at the back of my head: organizing it all.

My previous system was thus: gather resources, put it all in a folder, done.

That's it. There was no real system. I'd just gather everything into a folder somewhere. Not even properly titled, just splayed out in non-alphabetical order. Which would be a giant pain in the ass because bibliographies are alphabetized.

And I had to slink between different styles like MLA or CMOS or APA, depending on the class. There have been a few times where I'd write my citations and bibliography in APA only to realize it's for a history class and thus requires CMOS.

Recently, I discovered Zotero and ooh boy, it's a game changer. I don't mean to sound like an ad, but I really wished I used this earlier. I had heard of it, but I'd be fuck to download and install something and learn it when I've got something due. My folder "system" was just fine.

No, but really. It's, so far, perfect. Exactly what I was missing. Currently, I research for a lot of different projects, so having a place where I can store everything into different "libraries" is incredibly useful.

I can easily stick in different kinds of sources, often PDFs, like newspaper articles, journal articles, and books. What's nice is that I can fill out the source's information (e.g. title, author, date of publication, journal name, volume, etc.) and that'll be stored for when I have to create my bibliography.

What's especially useful, is that I can then export or just drag over the sources and it'll all be formatted correctly. If I'm using CMOS, it'll format it just fine. MLA? No problem. APA? Sure. I can change styles with just a few clicks of a button and re-export. Super handy. And it's all ordered alphabetically.

It even comes with a built-in PDF viewer, so I don't have to have another piece of software running.

So I've been kind of kicking myself for not using it before. Would've been useful during college, where I'd be writing papers with dozens of sources. Oh well.

P.S.

Here's something interesting I found when looking at Zotero, which led me down a rabbit hole of sorts.

One of the funders of the project is The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This is a foundation created by the Mellon family, a very wealthy and very influential family whose members, for example, have worked in the U.S. government. They're old money. You might be familiar with Carnegie Mellon University, of which the they're half of the namesake, for example.

One of its members, Christopher Mellon, worked at the Department of Defense and, interestingly, at the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program or AATIP. This program, AATIP, was dedicated to the study of UFOs (or rather UAPs in today's nomenclature).

He was main source for the 2017 New York Times article featuring three videos from the Pentagon of purported UAPs.

He was also a member of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences started by Tom Delonge¹, Hal Puthoff², and Jim Semivan³. The company is primarily associated with UAPs and actually had a contract with the US government. Additionally, they have alleged to be in possession of exotic materials / metals from a UAP... which is a hard story to sell as it's more than likely they were just regular metals. They're also an entertainment company, offering albums, books⁴, and even clothing such as pants and hats.

Interesting guy. Make of that what you will.

His brother, Matthew Mellon worked as a businessman. He was primarily involved in cryptocurrency. He died in 2018 after suffering from a heart attack.

Recently, he was implicated⁵ in the Epstein files, wherein he is accused of being in a video with an underage girl.

Anyway, that was quite off topic. As someone who loves reading about UFOs / UAPs, conspiracies, and other high strangeness material, the Mellon family pops up a fair bit.

I just thought it was an interesting and weird rabbit hole.