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ANTH 257 Chinese Society After Mao: Zotero

What is Zotero?

Zotero is a free, open-source research tool that helps you collect, organize, and analyze research and share it in a variety of ways. Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software — the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references — and the best aspects of modern software and web applications, such as the ability to organize, tag, and search in advanced ways.

Zotero interacts seamlessly with online resources: when it senses you are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, 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.

Installation:

  1. Go to Zotero.org
  2. Install Zotero 5.0 for Windows & Zotero Connector

 

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 laptop.

 

Setup

  1. Open Zotero
  2. Go to Edit --> Preferences (in the top toolbar):
    1. Setup Sync - this will enable backup of your references into the Zotero cloud (UR has unlimited storage) and will enable syncing across devices
    2. Setup Cite - Zotero comes pre-loaded with the most prevalent 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 30 minutes

This video is a brief, but in-depth tour of how to use Zotero.

zotero- working with pdfs

The below video will show you some incredibly helpful tips on how to work with PDFs in Zotero. Most helpful is how you can automatically rename the files names of PDFs with the click of a button! See 3:00 timestamp.

If you have Zotero 5 installed on your computer (current version as of Spring 2020) you'll need to install Zotfile so you can extract annotation information from PDFs and turn them into searchable notes within Zotero.