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WRTG 105 The Climate Crisis (Conklin)

What Is Zotero?

Zotero is a free, open-source reference manager that helps you collect, organize, and analyze sources for your research and share them in various ways. It allows you to:

  • store author, title, and other publication information for articles, books/ebooks, websites, and more
  • export that information as formatted references for bibliographies, footnotes, and endnotes
  • download and organize PDFs
  • organize, annotate, tag, and search your sources

Zotero interacts seamlessly with most online resources: when it senses you are viewing an ebook, article, website, or other online resource, it can automatically extract and save complete bibliographic references. Zotero effortlessly transmits information to and from other web services and applications, and it runs both as a web service and offline on your personal devices.

For more information, see the Zotero page in our Reference Managers guide!

The Zotero documentation page provides more detail on using Zotero, including tons of customization options.

Quick Introduction to Zotero

Installation & Setup

Installation

  1. Go to Zotero.org
  2. Download and install Zotero 6 for Windows and the Zotero Connector for your browser
  3. Note: Using your UR email with Zotero will allow you to take advantage of unlimited cloud storage

If you have trouble with installation, follow these steps:

  1. Open your preferred browser
  2. Close all your tabs
  3. Close unneeded software
  4. Update your browser – Zotero works with Safari, Chrome & Firefox
  5. Restart your device

Setup

  1. Open Zotero
  2. Go to Edit --> Preferences (in the top toolbar):
    • Set up Sync – this will enable backup of your references into the Zotero cloud (as long as you're using your UR email) and will enable syncing across devices.
    • Set up Cite – Zotero comes preloaded with commonly used citation styles. If the citation style you'd like to use isn't listed, you can add it in by choosing the "Get additional style..." link.

Zotero in Under 13 Minutes

Taking a few minutes to learn the basics of Zotero will save you a lot of time!