Keith Knop — updated September 2014
What Is Zotero?
Zotero is a tool created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images,
and other objects). It’s available as a Firefox add-on or as a standalone version that can be
used by itself or with Chrome or Safari: http://www.zotero.org/
Using Zotero, you can…
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Organize and keep track of all your research sources
Save full-text documents together with their citation information
Access your library from anywhere with a free Zotero account
Format your notes and references according to Chicago, APA, Turabian, and other
styles
Create auto-updating citations and bibliographies in Word or Open Office
Zotero is free! A Zotero account also provides 300 megabytes of storage space for your PDF or
other full-text documents; larger storage plans are available for an annual fee.
Adding Items
You can add items to your Zotero library manually by clicking the
plus button in the Zotero pane, choosing the correct type of item,
and filling in the appropriate information.
If you also install the browser
extensions for Chrome, Firefox,
or Safari you can also import
items into Zotero directly from
your browser by clicking on the
Zotero icon in your address bar (or to the left of it, in Safari). If the
item has a full-text version available, such as an item in JSTOR or
another database, Zotero will try to save the file automatically so
you can refer to it directly from your library, even if you’re offline.
You can also manually add files to items using the Store Copy of File… menu option.
Zotero can also import citation data (via the File > Import… menu) saved in a number of
common formats, including RIS, BibTeX, CTX, and RefWorks’s and Endnote’s custom export
formats.
Creating a Bibliography
You can create a bibliography from your library (or a
subcollection in your library) by right-clicking on the
folder and choosing Create Bibliography From
Collection….
You’ll get a list of citation styles to choose from and
a list of options for how you want the bibliography to
be output—copied to your clipboard so you can
paste it directly into a document, or saved as its own
file.
Keith Knop — updated September 2014
Using the Word Plugins
In Windows, the Zotero buttons show up under the Add-Ins
tab at the top of the screen: from left to right, the buttons are
to add citations, edit citations, add a bibliography, edit the bibliography, refresh citations,
set options, and remove codes (convert everything to ordinary text—this makes things
easy to share, but note they won’t update automatically anymore!)
On Macintosh systems, these options show up as text under the Applescript icon:
By default, inserting a citation
gives you a quick-entry field
that allows you to search for
items in your library by author
or title. Select an item from
the list. If you need to include
page numbers or other
location information click the
citation in the quick-entry field
for a pop up.
You can also choose to use Classic
Mode by clicking on the Z icon and
choosing it from the dropdown. Classic
Mode shows you a full list of your items,
gives you a little more control over how
they display, and lets you cite multiple
sources at once.
When you’re done writing, the Insert
Bibliography button will generate a
bibliography from all of the citations in
your paper. If you need to tweak how
things show up in your bibliography, the
Edit Bibliography button allows you to
change how individual items display. Note that doing so will stop any items you edit
from updating automatically, so this should probably be the last thing you do.