Here are three great plug-ins for Firefox that should have anyone who does scholarly work converting right away.
1. LibX – A very useful toolbar for Firefox 3, it allows you to search the journals and catalogs of the New York Public Library (ok, geographic bias, but still pretty cool) for whatever you might want. Additionally, if you are on a page that contains a citation, or an ISBN, it will automatically provide a link to that item in the library catalogs. Yes, it searches the text of the website you are visiting and does this automatically. Very useful. It can be configured to limit your searches to things that you can actually check out, or online journals that you can access from home.
2. Zotero – A bibliographic citation manager for firefox. It lives in the bottom bar of your browser and awakens when it senses something that you might want to cite. It adds the full citation to a file it keeps for you, and allows you to make notations on each citation. Furthermore, it allows you to add tags, and has drag and drop citation for MS Word and OpenOffice. If you don’t like that, you can export your entire citation file to Refworks or Endnote!
3. Scribefire – A Firefox add-on that allows you to blog from inside your browser. I’m using it right now and I must say it’s easier, quicker and more intuitive than Windows Live Writer, and also it’s fast. If you are looking at something you want to blog about, you can click the icon in your window tray and start writing. It saves drafts, has full image upload capability and pretty much any features you would expect from stand-alone blogging programs. It rocks.
So there you have it, three great plug-ins or add-ons for Firefox that anyone involved in research or writing simply can’t live without.
If that doesn’t convince you, the Firefox location bar will. You just type in any keyword of what you want, and the program automatically suggests websites. The kicker? These are websites you would actually want to go to, not just spam or adds or junk. It really seems like it’s reading my mind sometimes.