Hello, and welcome to Part Two of a series of tutorials on using Zotero at RIT. I am your presenter, Roman Koshykar, one of the
reference and instruction librarians at RIT. Please note that you can always refer to the RIT Libraries’ InfoGuide on Zotero for support
on using this citation management system.
Zotero offers many features that allow you to better organize the library of references and documents you save from your online
searches. For instance, you can sort references in your library into different collections. Collections are hierarchical
groupings that you can create according to any scheme you wish to use, and items from your library can belong to one or many collections or
subcollections. To create a collection, simply click the New Collection button at the upper left, above the My Library folder.
Zotero will prompt you to choose a name for the collection, and once you have chosen a name, the new collection appears in the
file structure below My Library. If desired, you can create a subcollection by right-clicking any collection folder and selecting New
Subcollection from the menu. Adding items to a collection is easy – Zotero lets you drag and drop one or more items from the center pane
directly to a collection. Let’s choose some items from my library to put into my new collection, which I named “Dinosaurs.”
I can search everything saved in my library using the search box above the center pane. If I search for dinosaurs, Zotero will find all items
with the keyword dinosaurs in any field or tag in my library. I can use my mouse and keyboard to highlight all of these items, and then drag
and drop them into the Dinosaurs collection.
Zotero also allows you to add organizational information to individual items in your library. Let’s view an item in the detail pane on the
right. You can add Notes to your items by selecting the Notes tab. Notes are useful for reminding yourself what an item was saved to
your library for, and the text of notes is searchable in Zotero.
You can also add custom Tags to an item by selecting the Tags tab.
Tags are useful for associating a subject term with an item and grouping items on the same subject together for easy retrieval.
At the bottom left, you’ll find a Tag Selector, which allows you to browse or search all tags found in a collection or in your full library.
Sometimes Zotero automatically saves tags when you save certain references – for instance, subject headings from items saved
from library catalogs are imported as tags.
As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, Zotero gives you the option of syncing your data with Zotero’s servers when you create a Zotero
account. Syncing has a number of advantages, but if you choose to sync your data, please use Zotero’s native sync feature,
as syncing with most third-party file storage systems is known to cause issues with data corruption. Syncing is optional, but to set up
syncing, open your Preferences from the Edit menu, then select Sync preferences. Here, you can enter your Zotero credentials as I have
done. I recommend checking the Sync Automatically option so that Zotero syncs all your data each time you launch the application,
but you can leave this unchecked if you wish to sync manually. If you check Sync Full-Text Content, the text from any saved PDFs will be
indexed and made searchable from both the Zotero application and in your Web Library on Zotero’s website.
To share references and collaborate with colleagues, use Zotero Groups. Groups are another feature that you can access with your
free Zotero account. Use your account to log into Zotero Groups on the web.
From here, you can create a new group with either public or private membership. Public groups can be open to anyone or have closed
membership by invitation only. You can view and interact with your groups on the web, where you can manage group members.
You can also view shared references from groups you belong to in the Zotero application,
and create citations and bibliographies from shared references. More on this later.
Before I wrap up this module, I’d like to share a few helpful advanced features of Zotero with you. If you right click on a reference item
and select Find Available PDF, Zotero will use the Unpaywall service to locate an open access PDF of the article, if available.
You can then attach the PDF to the reference item. The right click menu also allows you to quickly generate citations.
Simply select Create Bibliography from Item, and then choose a citation style when prompted.
You can copy the citation to your clipboard and then paste it into a document or email fully formatted according to your chosen style.
You can also create a bibliography from a collection this way.
This concludes the Organize, Sync, and Collaborate module of this tutorial series. In the next module, I will demonstrate using
Zotero’s writing integration tools to create citations and bibliographies.