Hi everyone, in this section of citation management tutorial we're going to be
talking about how to manage your citations in Zotero. This is meant to be
a crash course or an overview it's not meant to get into all of the features
and functions of the program. The best way to see if this is something that's
going to work for you is to really sit for about an hour or so play around with
it and get comfortable with it. Zotero is a program that lets you manage
all of the citations that you have for your research materials and it's
available in two different versions. To get the full functionality I recommend
that you use both of those versions so that you can store your collections both
online and then on your own computer or in fact as many computers as you use.
Zotero is a program that allows you to collect the information that you need
about each of the resources you use, to organize those resources into
collections that make sense to you, to format citations and create
bibliographies, and then to sync everything between your online account
and any of the computers that you have it installed on. The first thing you
want to do to get started on Zotero is to go to zotero.org and register for
your free account by clicking on register in the upper right hand corner
In order to get the full functionality like I said you want to have your online
account which lets you access your collections of citations from anywhere
that you have the Internet but you also want to have the piece that lives on
your computer and so to do that after you've registered for your free account
you want to click on download now and you have two different options. You have
Zotero for Firefox which is an add-on that lives in your Firefox browser and
then you have Zotero standalone and this works with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari but
it looks a little bit different and it opens up in a separate application than
your browser. I'm going to be working with Zotero for Firefox so it'll look
just a little bit different for any of you who uses the standalone version. Once
you've downloaded and installed this version either version of Firefox on
your computer you're going to see this Zotero logo down in the bottom
right hand corner of your browser pane. When you click on this logo it opens the
Zotero pane and this is the pane that lets you see all of the items in your
collection. You can add organize and edit citations from both your online account
and from your Zotero browser version but you can only create bibliographies and
format citations from this browser version but we're going to talk more
about that in just a little bit. Before you start adding citations to your new
Zotero library we need to do a little housekeeping first so with the pane open
click on the gear icon and then select preferences. Under general you want to
make sure that all of the miscellaneous and group boxes are checked and under
sync you want to add your username and password that you've just created with
your online account and you want to make sure that this box sync automatically is
checked. This makes sure that all of your accounts sync when you add new resources
to any of your Zotero accounts. There are a number of different ways to import
your citations into your Zotero library and many times you can do it right from
your browser. When Zotero recognizes something that it can import you'll see
an icon in the address bar. Just a note for those of you who are using the
standalone version it's going to be an icon that's to the left of your address
bar. So for this New York Times article you can see a newspaper icon here and
all you have to do is click on the icon to import the citation. If you look down
at the right-hand side you can see a little box that pops up that tells you
that it's saving to your Zotero account and to check on that click on the Zotero
icon down here which opens your Zotero pane and you can see this is the
information that it imported. It has it listed by title but over here on the
right you can see all of the information that it picked up so you have all of the
bibliographic data that you need to ultimately create a citation. You also
have the URL if you ever need to get back to this article
In this section you can also add notes, you can add tags sometimes tags are
imported and you can either keep them or delete them, or you can link this article
to another related article in your Zotero library and when the arrow is
spinning you can see that it's syncing
You can also import items to Zotero right from the UNC library catalog. If
you click on the record for a book that you want to import the information
you'll see up here in the address bar that the icon is changed and now it's a
book Zotero is recognizing that this is bibliographic data from a book and so
if you click on that again it saves the item lets you know down in the
right-hand corner and to check you can open your Zotero account and there it is
all of the data that you need to create a citation and you can do the same
additions over here. You can also import Zotero items from a lot of the library
databases that you're going to be using to do your research so we're in
communication and mass media complete. I see an article that I want to save and
create a citation for and we learned that one way you can do it over here is
to click on cite and you can copy and paste but if you want to import it
directly into Zotero click on the icon up here it looks like a sheet of paper
and it saves it right to your Zotero account so now we have three items in
our Zotero library. There are a few other ways that you can add items to your
Zotero library and let's open this up a little bit so we can see the whole thing
If you look up here at this toolbar and you click on the green button you can
add an item manually so it gives you some initial options as to what kind of
resource it is but if the resource that you're importing isn't any of these
look down at more and you have all of these options
It creates the item and you simply have to fill in the information. You can also
add an item based on the web page that you're on. Basically what this does is it
saves the URL for you it pulls out some other information like maybe the title
sometimes it'll give you the date or the author's name if there is one and it'll
tell you that it's a web page and you simply have to fill in the rest of the
information yourself. If you click on the wand icon you can add an item by the
ISBN, the DOI, the ISSN, or the PubMed ID. That's a really fast and easy way to do
it. Another really quick and easy way that you can add resources to your
Zotero library is if you have them saved as PDFs on your desktop. All you need to
do is click on the PDF and drag it into the Zotero pane and drop it there and it
will import the PDF file and we can do that with a few of these. These are all
PDFs that I've downloaded from communication and mass media complete
and so now we have the PDFs and we can open them right from Zotero. They are
saved as files in your account but you can see if you look over here that we
don't have any bibliographic data for any of them
so no title no author any of that and there are a couple of different ways
that you can handle this. The easiest although it doesn't work all the time
it's always worth trying is to right-click on the PDF title and come
down here to retrieve metadata for PDF and what this is going to do is it tells
Zotero to try to look up what that information is so click on retrieve
metadata it usually takes no more than a few seconds and unfortunately for this
PDF which is a SWOT analysis we couldn't find Zotero couldn't find any matching
references so we're going to have to import that one manually and to do that
again you right click on it and come down here to create parent item
for the document and so what that does you see this arrow
that's been created over here if you click on that here's the original PDF
that we imported and here's a section now where we can type in the information
that we need to save it and to format a citation later. So let's try one of these
other PDFs. I'm going to right click on this one and come down to retrieve
metadata for PDF and it searched and it found so if you look over here it
found all of the information title author's everything that you need to be
able to create a citation for it so once you have all of these resources in your
Zotero library there are a number of different ways to organize them. As I
mentioned before you can tag them and the tags will usually show up down here
on the bottom left hand side of your Zotero pane. If you look up here on the
left hand side and click on my library this shows everything that you've
imported but you can also create subfolders and organize different
sections of resources and to do that all you need to do is right click on my
library, click on new collection, and it lets you name the folder. You can rename
the folder if you want to later and so all you need to do is drag items from
your library into that folder and to see what's in the folder click on it and it
shows you the items that you have. That doesn't remove items from this section
from this folder you can have items in as many folders or subfolders as you
want to. To create a subfolder you right-click on your folder, click on new
sub collection
and you can create as many sub collections as you want to as well. The
last feature I want to go over with Zotero is how to format citations and
create bibliographies. Remember you can only do this from the browser-based
version the version that you downloaded you can't do this from your online
version. To create a single citation from an item in your Zotero library all you
have to do is right-click on that item and come down to create bibliography
from selected item. You can choose the citation style that you prefer to use
have this as set as bibliography and what I usually do is copy to clipboard
and that allows me to simply paste the citation into a document that I'm using
and click OK so from here we can open a document and
paste our citation. To create a bibliography using multiple resources in
your Zotero library all you need to do is choose which folder that you want to
create a bibliography of, right-click on it, come down to create bibliography from
collection, go through the same steps, choose your citation style, make sure
that this is set to bibliography and copy to clipboard click OK and you can
open a document and paste it in. Always make sure that you go over your
bibliography or your citation after it's been created and double check to make
sure that it's formatted correctly and that there's not information missing. If
there is missing information or if you notice that it doesn't quite look right
chances are that it comes from how the information was entered and interpreted
by Zotero so for a citation that doesn't look right go back and find the item and
go over and see that all of the information here looks correct
This was a quick overview of some of the main features of Zotero. If you have any
questions you can always check these Zotero documentation online it does a
really great job of breaking down all of the features of Zotero and the steps
that you need to take to use them. They also have a really robust support forum
if you ever need to troubleshoot. At UNC libraries we also have an online guide
to help you use Zotero. If you go to the UNC library homepage click on writing
and citing and then Zotero. This is a librarian created guide that walks you
through some of the basic and more advanced features that Zotero has to
offer. Also available through UNC libraries is a book that actually I
found very helpful called Zotero a guide for librarians researchers and educators
and finally you can always get in touch with us at the Park Library if you have
any questions about formatting citations or about using Zotero. You can email us
or chat us give us a call or drop by