Back in the day when students were researching books, magazines, journals and manuscripts for their final thesis, they usually ended up with tons of photocopies, books, and hand-written notes on their table. But fast forward to modern times, students can manage everything on their laptop but still they end up having scanned pages, PDF files, images and other things in a number of folders. It is not easy to go through these folders whenever you want to look for a topic or cite a book or person in your final report.
A free software named Zotec makes your life easy by providing you a tool for managing all of your collections (books, magazines, papers etc) along with the ability to add metadata to each of these entries making it very easy for you to search for them later on.
Zotero comes as a Windows, Mac OS or Linux application. It also offers web browser extensions for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera. Using the extensions, you can translate, save and add entire web pages to your Zotero library. Using these integrated translators you can conveniently translate the contents of webpages and databases. Zotero not only translates but also fetches semantic metadata that are related to the site. PDF files are also downloaded, which are attached to the page.
The most important feature of the program is the ability to generate bibliography based on the possessed materials and create quotes. These quotes or citations contain professional references to be pasted in your thesis, for example, book name, author, page numbers, edition year, publisher etc.
All of you collections are added to the Zotero library and you can add metadata to all the items. You can even split the collected items in various categories for example dissertation, speech, final thesis and so on.
You can download Zotero from https://www.zotero.org/download/