With the modern internet, the difficulties of background research is less about locating sources than it is about keeping track of the most useful ones while you sift through the instantly-available resources. Zotero makes this management about as automatic as possible, freeing up your mental bandwidth for the actual content.
Be sure to add the appropriate extension to your web browser of choice, which will let you grab a local copy of the paper and all its citation information once you’ve read enough to know you’ll want to use it later. Adding tags will let you further filter your collection when you need to refresh your memory on a given topic.
When the time for writing comes, Zotero can generate and maintain properly-formatted citations for you, either as a direct plugin (for Microsoft Word or Google Docs), or by exporting the data to a common format (e.g., BibTeX for a LaTeX document). As with any automatic tool, you need to double-check the output for correctness, but I’ve only had a handful of citations need manual correction.
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