Hi, my name is Julie Maybee, and I’m going
to tell you a bit about Zotero.
Zotero is a free bibliographic program that
can help you to (1) store, organize and manage
reference information, (2) cite articles,
books and so on in your papers, and (3) type
your bibliographies.
If you sign up for a free Zotero account online,
you can also (4) back-up all your references
on Zotero’s servers, and (5) join groups
and share references with other people.
In this video, I will briefly show you each
of these functions.
Use the internet to add reference items to
your Zotero library.
You can use Amazon.com to save book references,
for example. Select the folder in Zotero that
you want the reference to go into, and then
click the Zotero icon in Amazon.com. In Chrome,
the Zotero icon is in the address bar.
You can also use Worldcat.org to save book
references. Again, select the folder in Zotero
that you want the reference to go into, find
and select the book, and then click the Zotero
icon. Worldcat.org can also be used to save
reference information for some articles. You
can even find out which libraries near you
have the item that you’re looking for.
Keep in mind that Zotero is not saving the
books themselves, only the book reference
information.
For most scholarly articles, you will want
to use your library’s databases to save
reference information. While you are doing
your research, whenever you find an article
you might be interested in, simply get in
the habit of saving the article’s reference
information to Zotero before you download
the article.
Zotero can save .pdfs of some of the articles
from these databases, but I recommend you
download a copy of the .pdfs separately anyway.
You can organize your references into different
folders, or collections, and sub-folders.
You can drag and drop items into folders to
move them or copy them to new locations in
your library.
And if you sign up for a Zotero group, the
group’s folders will appear in your Zotero
window. You can use the shared folder exactly
the same way you use your own folders.
Once you have references in your Zotero library,
you can use those references to generate citations
and bibliographies in your papers.
When you are writing your paper and want to
add a citation, click the “add citation”
icon. The first time you do this with a new
document, Zotero will ask you what format
you want to use. Select your format. Then
find the reference you want, select it, add
page number, and click “return.”
Let me add a few more citations to the paper.
When you are ready to type the bibliography,
simply click the icon for adding the bibliography,
and let Zotero do it for you.
