Zotero  

[zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources.

A personal research assistant.

• Zotero is the only research tool that automatically senses content in your web browser, allowing you to add journal articles, websites and books from the PLU library's catalog  with a single click.
• You can add PDFs, images, audio and video files, snaps shots of web pages, and really anything else 

Organize your Sources Across your Devices

• ​Zotero automatically synchronizes your data across as many devices as you choose. 
• You can tag and organize your research items however you like.
• You can also save your searches for next time. 

Cite Your Sources

• Whether you need to create footnotes, endnotes, in-text citations, or bibliographies, Zotero will do all the dirty work for you, leaving you free to focus on your writing.
• You can create citations in Word and OpenOffice without ever leaving your word processor and add references to an email, a Google Doc, or some other editor simply by dragging one or more references out of Zotero.

Collaborate and Share with your Group

• Create and join research groups to focus on any topic you choose. Each group can share its own research library, complete with files, bibliographic data, notes, and discussion threads. Tag and analyze your research together with others. Work with a single colleague or an entire class: Zotero groups can include as many members as you please.

Use it to Cite in Google Docs

• Once you install the Zotero Connector for Chrome, Zotero will show up as a tab in your Google Docs. Click on the tab to add in citations and create a bibliography with one click.  

Follow the steps below to get started

Download it or add it to your browser.

The video below illustrates how to capture citation information and full text files from databases like JSTOR, and websites. You can also add links to files or file attachments to citations once you have them in your Zotero Library. Finally, note that you can configure your Zotero preferences to locate full text using RULA's library lookup and retrieve citation details for PDF files you drag and drop into your Zotero library.

Adding Items: 

• Via your web browser
• Generic Webpages
• PDFs
• Multiple Results
• Saving to a Specific Collection or Library
• Data Quality and Choosing a Translator
• Add Item by Identifier
• Adding PDFs and Other Files
• Saving Webpages
• Importing from Other Tools
• Large-Scale Imports from Databases
• Manually Adding Items
• Editing Items
• Verify and Edit Your Records

• Collections and Tags
• Duplicate Detection
• Notes
• Related
• Searching
• Sorting

• Creating Bibliographies within Zotero
• Word Processor Integration
• Reports
• Citation Styles

• Data and File Syncing
• Groups
• Backup

Google Docs

Google Docs support is part of the Zotero Connector for Chrome. 

Using Google Docs and Zotero 

Microsoft Word

Installing the Zotero Word plugin adds a Zotero tab to Microsoft Word.

Help Documentation

Zotero Troubleshooting

Help and Documentation

This guide's content is adapted from the Zotero guide at Ryerson University, with many thanks.