Citation management software

To get started with Zotero, you'll need:

• Zotero account: You need a Zotero acocunt in order to use the tool.
• Zotero Desktop: The software you install on your computer. This is where you capture and manage your Zotero library, though this library is backed up on Zotero's servers.
• Zotero Connector: a browser extension that lets you pull citations into your Zotero collection as you find them.
• Zotero Word Processor Integration: a plug-in that enables you to add either individual citations as you go or whole bibliographies later. You pull citations from your Zotero library into Word.
• Zotero works best on a desktop computer, but there are also some Zotero Mobile Apps available for iOS and Android that you might like to check out.

Using a browser plug-in called 'Zotero Connector', Zotero enables you to auto-capture citation information as you discover the articles, books, or other material you want to collect. 

The Zotero Connector senses the kind of material you are looking at online, from journal articles to books to websites. Depending on the material, the icon - found in the top-right corner of your browser - will look different.

• If you are looking at an article, the icon will look like a piece of paper:  
• If you are looking at a book, the icon will look like a book:  
• If you are looking at a webpage, the icon like this:  

and so on. 

When you encounter an article/book/website you would like to add to your Zotero library, click on the Zotero Connector icon. If you have a specific folder into which you would like to save this citation, select it from the 'Saving to' drop downmenu. 

If you have installed the Zotero software and the Zotero Connector plug in, and do not see any of the icons pictured above, they may be hidden under an icon that looks like a puzzle piece. Try clicking on that puzzle piece icon and seeing if you can 'pin' the Zotero plug in your browser.

Two key ways to organize your Zotero collection are by adding citations to a folder and/or by tagging citations.

Create and add citations to a folder

Click on the 'New collection' icon in the top right and give it a name. You can have folders for courses, for papers, or for whatever other category you would like.

Drag and drop citations from your main collection into your chosen folder. 

• You can nest your folders underneath each other to create subfolders. So, for example, you could have a folder for all the readings for all your classes, with a subfolder for each class.
• A single item can be placed in multiple folders. For example, you could have the same citation in a 'Course readings' folder and an 'Assignment readings' folder..
• Any changes you make to an item (updating the citation information) will update the item everywhere it is stored.
• All items can always be found in your top-level "My Library" folder in the top right of your Zotero software.
• Want to see which folders an item is in? From "My Library", select the item you're interested in and hold down the CTRL key. Any folders containing that item will be highlighted yellow:

Tag items:

In the "Info" pane on the right-hand side of your Zotero collection, you'll see several tabs for each specific citation..

The "Tags" tab allows you to add tags to individual items. (When you click on this tab, you may notice there are some tags already present. Zotero usually pulls these from any "keywords" associated with the item when the citation is extracted.)

You can use the tags however seems best to you. The best thing about tags is that they are searchable -- so you can easily find all the items marked with a particular tag, no matter which folder(s) they're in.

 

Before you begin:

For Zotero to generate accurate citations, the citation information you collect need to be complete and accurate as well. If you are missing an author's name, for example, Zotero cannot provide you with the correct citation for that item.

To review your Zotero collection, click on 'My Library', or whatever more specific folder you will be generating citations from, and double check that you have correct and complete citations.

Depending on your citation style, you may also need to set your titles to sentence case. APA 7 requires sentence case for article and book titles, for example. To do this, select a title from the middle pane and then, on the right,  right click on the title and choose 'Sentence case' from the menu.

 

Generating citations

Here are the two ways to auto-generate citations using Zotero.

Quick bibliography:

If you can drag and drop citations out of Zotero and into Word, it will format citations for you in your chosen citation style. To do this, size your Zotero software and your Word software so one window overlaps the other. Highlight the citations you want from your Zotero collection and drag them into Word. Voila!

Citing while you write:

When you are writing and want to auto-insert citations from your Zotero collection into your Word document:

Make sure your Zotero software is running

Click on the 'Zotero' menu option in Word (example shown for Word, but the process is similar in LibreOffice/Google) and then "Add/Edit Citation".

If you have not done it before, you will need to select your citation style

A search box will display in which you can keyword search your Zotero collection. You can type in an author's name, an article title, or any other piece of the citation.

Select the article you want from the list of options.

You can edit the in-text citation (for example, adding a page number) by clicking on the highlighted citation:

When you have finished your paper and are ready to generate your bibliography, click on the 'Add/Edit Bibliography' in the Zotero menu of Word.

 

 

Quick start guide - from Zotero