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Citation & Referencing Guide: Zotero Reference Management Software

Discusses citation and referencing styles and their importance in scholarly writing.

Zotero

Zotero is an open source reference management software designed to store, manage, and cite bibliographic references, such as books and articles. The name “Zotero” is loosely based on the Albanian word zotëroj, meaning “to acquire, to master,” as in learning. The software works on Windows, Apple and Linux.

It allows you to:

  • Collect bibliographic information (extracts metadata) on books, journal articles, videos and other resources from library resources, databases, andf ree sites..

  • Collect PDFs, file, images for each citation/reference in your library.

  • Create a bibliography and in-text citations in a variety of reference styles in a Word or OpenOffice document.

  • Sync among computers and the cloud.

  • Create Groups to share citations, collection, notes and tags with colleagues.

Why Zotero?

Reasons to choose Zotero:

  1. Unparalleled Support: Zotero accords the user to get timely responses to any quiries they have regarding the software directly from the software developers or experts community member.
  2. Constant Improvement: New features are constantly added to the software for the users' added benefits.
  3. Privacy: Privacy to personal data is guaranteed as the software developers allows for the software to be used even without a Zotero account oor without sharing any data with them.
  4. Free and Open Source: No usage fees are required to use the software and it is also a community project which implies that one is free to make changes to its code to make it do what you want.
  5. Advanced Features: Among other features, Zotero allows the user to save high-quality publication data from websites, journal articles, newspapers, and more, or to retrieve publication data for PDFs you drag in. It also has word processor integration for Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs makes it easy to manage citations as you write. Through the software, advanced searches can also be performed.

Getting Started

  1. Download Zotero 5.0 for Windows which is your personal research assistant. It is also available for macOS, Linux 32-bit & Linux 64-bit.
  2. Install Browser Connector (Add-on/extension)
  3. Install the Zotero Connector for your browser (which works best with Chrome or Firefox). Zotero connector automatically sense content as you browse the web and allow you to save it to Zotero with a single click.

Uploading documents to the library

Any of the following options can be utilised to add references to your Zotero Library.

  • Zotero Connector (in browser)
  • Using a standard number via Zotero application. These are unique numbers that identify each item such as:
    • ISBN - book identifier (10 or 13 digits)
    • Digital Object Identifier (DOI) - many scholarly articles have this number, and they all start with 10.
    • PubMed ID - health/medical-related articles in the PubMed database 
  • Manually enter a citations in Zotero application
  • Using the drag and drop option.

Training & Support

Other Reference Management Software

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