Hi everyone, in this section of the Citation Management Tutorial we're going to talk
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 or functions of the program. The best way
to see if this is something that's going to work for you is to really sit down for about
an hour or so, play around with it, and just get comfortable with it.
Zotero is a program that lets you manage all of the citations that you have for your research
material. Zotero lets you collect the information you need about each of the resources you use,
organize those resources into collections that make sense to you, format citations and
create bibliographies, and then sync everything between 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. You can do this by clicking "Log In" in the upper right hand corner and then clicking
"Register" on the next page. After you've registered for your free account,
you want to click download. From here, you'll see two different options. You have Zotero 5.0, which
can be downloaded straight to your desktop. You also have the Zotero Connector, which can
be used on Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. To get the full functionality, you'll want
to download both; the desktop application to store your citations, and the browser connector
to easily extract information from whichever web browser you're using.
Once you've downloaded and installed Zotero, you'll see the shortcut on your desktop.
When you click to open Zotero, it lets you see all of the items in your collection. From here, you
can add, organize and edit citations, as well as create bibliographies.
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 bit of
housekeeping first. So with the program open, select "Edit" in the top left, and
scroll down to "Preferences." Now go to "General." From here, you want to make sure that
all the boxes underneath "File Handling", "Miscellaneous", and "Groups" are checked. Next, under Sync
you want to type in the username and the password for the account that you just created. And once you've done that, this page
will come up where you can see the boxes Sync Automatically and Sync Full-text
Content. You want to make sure that both of these are checked. What this does is make sure your account syncs when you add resources
to Zotero from any computer that you can use.
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 the Zotero Connector recognizes something
that it can import, you'll see an icon to the right of the address bar. So for this
New York Times article, you can see a newspaper icon here and all you have to do is click
the icon to import the citation. Once you click it, you'll see a box that pops up underneath
that tells you that it's saving to your Zotero account. To check on that, click open
the Zotero window and you can see the article that was just imported.
And over here on the right, you can see all the information about the article 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 and you can add tags. Sometimes tags are imported
automatically, and you can either keep these or delete them. You can also link this article to another related
article in your Zotero library.
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 from, you'll see
up here in the address bar that the icon has now changed into a book. Zotero is recognizing
that this is bibliographic data from a book and if you click on the icon it saves and we can see the same box pop up like
we did before. To check that it saved to Zotero, you can open the program and as you can see it's imported all of the data that
you need to create a citation. And you can do the same additions like you did
before. You can also import Zotero items from a lot of the library databases that you're going
to use to do your research. So right now we're in Communication and Mass Media Complete,
and I see an article that I want to save and create a citation for. We learned that one way you
can do this is to click "cite" over here on the right and to just copy and paste the citation. But if you want to
import it directly into Zotero, just click on the icon up here that looks like a sheet of paper,
and it saves directly into your Zotero account.
So now we have some new items in our Zotero library, but there are a few other ways that you can add
items to Zotero. If you look up here at this toolbar and you click on the green button
you can add an item manually. It gives you some initial options as to what kind of resource
it is, but if the resource that you want to import isn't any of these, look down and you have
a lot more options. What this does is it creates the item and then you simply have to type in the information yourself.
Another easy way to add in a citation is to click on this wand icon, and then you can add in an item by typing in the ISBN, DOI, ISSN, or
PubMed ID. This is a really fast and easy way to do it.
Another 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 window and it will import the PDF file. These are PDFs that I've
downloaded from Communication and Mass Media Complete.
When you drag the PDF over, Zotero is going to try to look up what all the information
is. As we can see with the first PDF, the SWOT analysis, everything worked out and all
the information is there. Now let's try this second one. Like before, we're just
going to drag it over. And, we can see Zotero search for the information. And unfortunately
for this PDF, Zotero couldn't find any matching references. So, we're going to have to add in the data for
this one manually. To do that, you right click on it and you come down here to "Create Parent
Item" for the document. And what this does is save the original PDF that we imported
and then create a new section where we can type in the information that we need to format
a citation later. You can see both of these sections if you click on the arrow that's
been created over here.
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
show up here on the bottom left hand side. And if you look up here to the left hand
side at the very top and click on "My Library", this shows every item that you've ever imported. But you can also create folders and
subfolders to organize different sections of resources, and all you need to do
to do that is to click on "My Library" and select "New Collection", and it lets you name the
folder. And you can rename the folder later if you want to. Then, all you need to do is drag
items from "My Library" into that folder. So there's one, and there's two. And to double-check and see what's in the folder, click on it
and it shows the items that you just imported. Moving files over from "My Library" or a different folder doesn't remove them
from any one section. You can have items in as many folders or subfolders as you want.
And to create a subfolder, you right-click on the folder, and click "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 in Zotero is how to format citations and create bibliographies.
To create a single citation from one 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".
And, you can choose the citation style that you prefer to use. Have the "Output Mode"
set as "Bibliography", and what I usually do is select "Copy to Clipboard". And
this allows me to simply paste the citation into whichever document I'm using. Then, click
"OK." So from here we can open a document and paste in our citation.
To create a bibliography from 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, and come
down to "Create Bibliography from Collection" and all you do is go through the same steps as before. Choose your
citation style, make sure this is set to "Bibliography" and select "Copy to Clipboard",
click "OK", and you can open the document again and let's copy and paste.
And always make sure that you go over your bibliography or your citation after it's 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 look quite
right, chances are that this comes from how the information was entered and interpreted
by Zotero. So for a citation that doesn't look quite right, go back, find the item,
and just correct any wrong information there.
This was a quick overview of some of the main features of Zotero. If you have any questions
you can always check the "Zotero Documentation" page online; it does a really great job of breaking
down all the different 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.
And at the UNC Libraries page, at library.unc.edu, we have a Zotero guide. You can get there
by clicking on "Support & Guides" and scrolling down to "Citing & Writing". And
once you scroll down just a little more, you can click on "Zotero" right there and
this brings you to a librarian-created guide that walks you through some of the basic
and more advanced features that Zotero has to offer.
Thank you for watching and I hope this tutorial helps!