The first step we need to take before using Zotero is to download it. So if you go to zotero.org
from a web browser. It must be Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Opera.
Unfortunately, it does not work with Internet Explorer, but from any of the other four if you go to zotero.org
you will see on the home page a large link to download it. So if you click on that button
we'll be taken to the download page.
So you need both of these pieces for Zotero to work properly. The
component on the left is the application that is downloaded to your hard drive.
So this is the part that takes up some space in order to store your files, and then the connector is
what helps bridge between the research that you're finding on the internet, and getting that
information into the Zotero application on your hard drive.
Now that Zotero is downloaded,
we can set up a few things that will help us use it the most efficiently.
So if you open up the application on your computer. For
me, I'm going to go to the Start menu and search for Zotero,
and I can find it under Programs.
From here, you can go to the Preferences menu.
So you'll find that under the Edit option in the toolbar, so Edit and Preferences and
there are a few things to set up here.
The first is the Sync feature, which is the second tab on the top, with the arrows, and
this is where you can enter a login for the zotero.org
website. So I highly recommend creating a free account.
If you don't yet have one, you can do so by clicking on the Create Account link. And this allows you to sync your
citations and any attachments, such as PDFs, on to the cloud
server for Zotero, so that you have a backup in case something happens to your computer,
but it also helps you sync across devices.
So, let's say sometimes you work on a desktop computer at home,
but then for school or for work you use a laptop sometimes.
Setting up your account and entering it here and all the computers that you use
will help you keep organized and up to date on all of those machines.
The other option I recommend setting up is found in the
Cite part of the menu.
So you can see there are several styles already
located in my Style Manager.
So these are different styles that I have added or that have come standard with Zotero.
So if you just installed it you'll probably just see some of the basic ones,
like the APA or MLA, Chicago, things like that.
However, there are lots more that you can add. So if there is a style that you need for a journal or for an
assignment you can find those online.
So there's an easy link right here called "Get additional
styles," and that will bring you to the page where you can search for and add
additional citation styles.
So now that we've set up those preferences we can close this dialog box.
Okay, now we're almost ready to start collecting
citations. But before I do that, I like to create a new folder for different projects that I'm working on.
So to do that, you can go to the top left where it says "New Collection," and
then just click the button,
and then it will prompt you to enter a name.
So I am going to just put "Test folder."
Okay, now you'll see that this is empty,
in
contrast to my library, which does have some things.
These are just examples that I've saved during other teaching sessions. If
you have just downloaded Zotero, your library will be empty.
But, the difference between a folder and a library is that
anything you put in a folder will automatically be put in your master library as well, and
you can also just save things directly to your library if you would prefer.
But I do recommend setting up individual folders so that you can keep yourself organized.
Here, I'm going to minimize the desktop application.
So make sure not to close it, because we do need it to still run in the background.
But we're just going to move it out of the way temporarily, while we gather our research.
So here I have the library website,
and I'm on one of our database pages.
So here's a listing of some of our popular databases.
We also have an A to Z list if there's something there that you'd like to look for.
But if you're not sure where to start I definitely recommend checking out these popular databases.
I am going to look at this ProQuest SciTech collection as an example.
So I'm clicking the link.
It is very important if you are accessing databases from off-campus,
to be going through the library website,
because this will put you through the proxy server and make sure that you can access it. Otherwise,
you'll probably receive an error that you don't have the proper credentials or something like that. So make sure to always go through the
library website to get to our databases.
From here I can just run a basic search. It could be any search you like.
I'm going to search for "circuit deicing."
Now you'll see that I have several results with those search terms, and on this page alone I have 20 different
items that came up. So I can save these all at once to my Zotero library.
So if your research style is to kind of pull in everything at once and then later on go through them,
then this might be for you. So in the top corner
you'll see I have this folder icon, and when I hover over it, it says "Save to Zotero." So if I click on that folder,
it's bringing up the twenty results that came up on this page. So I could select all of them, I could
just choose a few that I want to add.
And if I say "OK,"
you can see in the top right here, it's saving these items to my test folder.
You can see that if it's able to get the PDF of the text, it's also saving that.
So that's one way to save. If you prefer to take an individual look at your articles before you save them, then I
recommend saving them individually instead of using this folder icon.
For example, if I look at this first item.
So from here I could read the abstract,
I could just kind of take a closer look at it before I save it to my research folder.
So if it is something that you'd like to save,
instead of that folder icon, which appears when there's multiple citations on a page,
instead we see this article icon instead.
So if I click on that,
now it's just saving the single item to my test folder.
And again, it is getting the PDF for me since we have the access to the PDF through this database.
Back to my results.
So when you're searching you probably will find,
some items where,
instead of a PDF link you see this option to "Find Full Text."
So if you see that, I recommend clicking on it, and
in this case we don't have access to that article.
But, this brings you to the page where you can request it, and
then,
once you receive a copy of the article, it's very easy to pull that into your Zotero library.
And I will show you how to do that a little bit later on.
That's really all there is to saving citations that you find online.
This also works through Google Scholar, all the library databases,
it works in the library catalog. So if you're using books or ebooks it can also capture that data for you.
It also works for just general websites,
although usually there's not quite as much data that it can obtain,
as compared to journal articles or other pages that are written in a way that Zotero can extract a lot of
data from.
But it all works exactly the same way
where you just click the icon and,
it will always look a little bit different based on the type of screen or page that you're on,
but the same principle applies no matter what you're trying to save.
So now that we've saved some research into a folder in Zotero, we can go back to the desktop application.
I'm just going to click on the Z button,
and we can see some of the items that we saved from online, from the database. So if I click on
the entry for this first one. On
the right there are several fields that it captured for us, and
all of these fields can be edited. So if there's an issue with the title,
perhaps if it didn't capture something correctly...Maybe it should be "Vehicles, plural."
You can change anything you need to in any of these fields.
The page number is not correct, something like that.
Something that's nice to keep in mind is the author field. So in this case we do have
traditional two-name field, so we have a first name and a last name. But
say for example that, your article or your research item
was authored by a corporation or an organization.
You can switch this to a single field.
So it's the small box right next to it, and that will create one field.
So say it was, you know, the Centers for Disease Control,
something like that where it doesn't follow that first-name-last-name
format, you can change that there.
You can also change it back since,
in this case I do want the two field names.
Anything at all can be edited,
including the type of
article or item. You can also add things manually.
So this green plus sign where it says "New item," if I
click on that I can add things manually.
So this works really well for things that don't exist online. So say if you have (and I can go to the more link here),
say that you have an email that you're using as a reference, or you interviewed someone,
or you have a map or something that's not easily
found online where you can just click the button, you can add things manually. So let's say if I have an email to add,
it's adding that type for me, you can see the little icon for an email, and then I can fill in these fields manually.
Research 101 was a subject for example. If there is a last name,
say I just have the first initial.
So you can manually fill things in too.
The magic wand button, which is right next to it,
can also add things by Ddentifier. So say if you have a DOI for example, or a PubMed ID, or
a book ISBN, you could enter those here and it will try and pull in data for you that has
the author names, and all the details that you would find online.
So I said earlier that I would show you how to
pull in a PDF. Say you had to request a
PDF from interlibrary loan, and it came a little bit later, and now you're trying to put it in your folder.
Or maybe you already have a folder of PDFs that you saved previously and you don't want to go through the hassle of
locating them again online just to put them in Zotero,
it's very easy just to drag those in. So I'm just going to make this a little bit smaller.
So I have an article saved on my desktop,
a PDF article.
So all I need to do is just click on it, and then drag it over to my folder and then let go.
Alright, and now
Zotero will automatically try and locate
metadata for that article.
So you might have noticed when I first pulled it in it was simply named "Article, " which is not very descriptive.
But Zotero
automatically found the metadata for it and created a record in your folder. So here I have the PDF which is
just kind of existing as an attachment to the actual citation.
You can see this is what I could edit if I needed to, but it did pull the title for me, the authors, all the
information that I would have gotten if I had found it online.
So that's a great time-saver, especially
if you have several items that you've already saved. If you ever need to delete something from your library, or
your folder, it's very easy to do so. You would just right click on the item, and
then you have the option of removing the item from your collection.
So this would just take it out of your folder,
but it would still exist in your master library.
Or, if you want to get rid of something totally, you can move the item to Trash and this will delete it
entirely from your Zotero account.
So those are the options for removing something.
So where the real value comes in with Zotero is the ability to create bibliographies from the research that you've saved.
So there are two ways to do this, one is a very quick way to
quickly export a bibliography, and
I will show you how to do that first. So,
let's say you have these items saved to your folder
or to your collection that you're saving to,
you can right-click on that folder, and
then go to the "Create Bibliography from Collection" option.
One of the advantages of Zotero is that your citations are not stored in any particular format,
just the data is stored. So things like the journal title,
authors, and so on are
just simply stored, but they're not in a particular citation style.
And it's not until you actually export something that it has you choose a style.
So that's a really great feature, because if you end up needing to use a different style later on,
but you're using the same references you can do that. So let's say that for this particular
bibliography I need to use the APA style. So I'm going to choose that.
I'd like my output mode to be a bibliography, and
then I want my output method as a "Copy to Clipboard."
So I like this method because,
this is just as if you were to do a control-c or command-c,
in order to copy text and now it's ready to paste anywhere that you can paste
text. So you could paste it into a LaTeX document, or a Google Doc, or an email,
and so on.
So I'm going to copy it to my clipboard and say okay,
and now I'm going to open Word, so I can paste it in my bibliography.
All right, now I'm just going to do control V to paste, just like a normal pasting.
Okay, and now you can see that it copied everything that was in my folder, and
it's in APA format. Now you might notice some errors, and unfortunately,
every kind of citation tool
will have some errors. There's always some sort of user involvement needed to make sure everything's correct.
But if you do notice any errors, or things you need to fix,
definitely fix them back in Zotero. So, just fixing the items in the actual field.
Because, that way it will be ready to go for you for next time, and
so you won't have to keep fixing it every time you copy and paste a bibliography.
So once you fix anything that you need to, just go through those same steps again.
So right click on the folder, and "Create Bibliography," so that you get the corrected version.
You also can just choose individual articles to create a bibliography.
So, say you didn't actually use all of these in your paper or your assignment.
You can just hold down the CTRL key
To choose the items that you did use.
So then, using just
those selected items you could right click and then
go through the same steps of creating a bibliography.
The other way of creating a bibliography, is
to insert your in-text citations as you go along writing a paper or an assignment, and then
Zotero can automatically create a bibliography based on the citations that you use throughout your paper.
So this is my preferred method because it helps me keep track of
several citations, and
since I need to kind of insert those anyway while I'm writing, it just makes the whole process a little bit easier.
So I'm going to go back to my Word document.
Actually, I'm going to create a new document.
So if you have Word on your computer,
you should have noticed that there is now a Zotero tab located on the toolbar.
So this was added when you installed Zotero.
So, I can just start writing what I need to.
So I'm just going to say, "Here is my first sentence."
I go to the Zotero tab, and
there is an "Add/Edit Citation" button.
So if I click on that.
Again, it's going to ask me what style I would like to use for this
particular paper.
Every time you create a new document, it will check with you to see what style it should use.
So I'm going to also use APA style for this,
and I'm going to keep all of the other default settings the same. So I'll say okay.
Now you can see that a toolbar popped up for me to find the citation that I need to insert here.
So you can just start typing anything about your article.
So if there was a word in the title you remember, or if it was an author,
anything like that.
So let's say this is my article that I need to use.
It's inserted for me there, I could say enter.
And you can see that it inserted the in-text citation for me.
Alright, okay. So let's look at another example.
I'm going to type another sentence.
I'm going to add another citation.
Let's say that you are unable to kind of recall anything about the article.
You don't remember the author name off the top of your head or anything
like that. You can actually toggle; there's two different views that you can toggle between. So if I click on the Z button,
if I switch over to the Classic View,
that will bring up a
representation of my Zotero folder.
So this view can be a little bit more helpful if you have multiple sources,
or maybe you have things saved in different locations, then you can kind of navigate a little bit more easily.
So let's say that I need to use these two articles,
that I clicked on. I can actually choose multiple sources.
So you can see I want this article. and I'm just moving that over,
and then it's adding it to the article that it already had.
All right, and I can add those by saying OK.
OK, so you can see that it added the in-text citations for me in the order that I wanted them to appear, and
the great thing about
Zotero, one of the other great things, is that it knows that I already cited to this article above.
If you're familiar with APA style, you know that if there's four authors,
the subsequent times that you cite to that article, you simply use the "et al."
So it's really great because Zotero kind of does that thinking for you and you don't have to worry about
going back to see if your already cited something, or if you end up
changing the order of these sentences, it will update to
correctly reflect what the citation should be.
So you can just go on like this--keep adding your in-text citations and then,
you can either wait to the end to add your bibliography, or you can really place it in at any time
because it will continue to update as you add more citations.
So instead of adding a citation as we have been, if I click on the Add Bibliography button,
it will add in the full references just for the articles that I cited to within my paper.
So that's the reason why I really enjoy this method, because I don't have to go in manually and see what I used.
If I use the tool to add citations, then Zotero knows what I used.
Now again, if you do notice errors,
do fix them in Zotero, because
your Word document will continuously
pull information from Zotero. So
say that I need to change the capitalization for this article.
For APA style, we actually use sentence case,
where anything besides the first letter and the proper-- I'm sorry, the first letter of the first word and
any proper nouns are capitalized, but everything else is lowercase. So I'm just going through and fixing that,
since that wasn't correctly done when it pulled it in.
So it looks like I fixed it.
But, if you save and close your document or the next time you add a citation or make any other change,
it will refresh the document, and just
continually pull from Zotero.
So just to show you,
if I refresh the document.
If you noticed, the changes I made actually just went back to what they were before.
So you really want to go back and fix it here.
So, I can fix that by going to that item.
This is a nice shortcut for those of you that do use APA style: if you right-click within the title,
you have the option to Tansform Text. You can switch to the sentence case,
and then you can see that it took all the the words and made the first letter lowercase.
Now one caveat is that,
it can't recognize what is a proper noun.
So for example, this "Friends For Life" Program.
I believe that's a proper noun since it's a name,
the name of a specific program.
So I'm going to go back and fix that here, and you could always check your articles to see exactly what needed to be
capitalized.
So you do need to kind of check for those proper noun instances.
But I did fix it here,
so now if I
move this out of the way again.
Now if I refresh the document,
you can see that it's fixed it to reflect what I put in to Zotero.
Another benefit of using Zotero in this way is that, if you need to change your style at some point,
say that you're writing an article that you are going to submit for publication to one journal,
and you end up changing your mind, and need to submit it somewhere else, and you actually have to use a different style than
what you had been typing in.
It's very easy to change your style.
So if I go to the Document Preferences
on the top,
I can change it to another style. So say I actually needed to use IEEE.
I just simply click on that style and say OK,
and you can see that it changed my in-text citations and also,
my bibliography at the end.
So those are all the major features of using Zotero.
They are working on
integrating this kind of in-text citation model into Google Docs.
However, at the time of this recording it's still in beta testing, so it's not available quite yet.
But do look out for that on the horizon if Google Docs is your preferred word processor over Word.
I also do not know of a way
currently to use this in-text citation method with LaTeX, if you are writing a thesis.
However, definitely check back with the library, and we'll continue to make
training and information available to help make it the most useful tool for you to use.
So, please contact me if you have any questions about using Zotero or any other research question.
Thank you so much for watching!
