3  Using Zotero

3.1 Add a collection

A collection is like a folder. You will want to create a new collection for each project or paper you are working on.

3.2 Add an item

Adding articles (or other items such as book chapters) to Zotero couldn’t be easier. Simply open Zotero, then drag and drop the pdf into “My Library” in the left panell. You can set up different “collections”, which is helpful to organize references by class assignment, for example, but this is not necessary unless you wish to do so.

3.3 Zotero “Items”

In Zotero, an item is simply a kind of entry in your library. It may be an article pdf, a book chapter pdf, or even a web address. In your library (the left panell), you will see a list of all of the items you have saved in Zotero. The entry you see is just the info… to read the item, click on the drop-down arrow at the left of the item and it will display the pdf – double click this to open it in the PDF Reader. This is an important distinction – clicking the entry itself will display the related Metadata (see below), or information about the item. Clicking the pdf from the drop down will not show that metadata.

3.4 Metadata

Metadata is the term for the information about the item you are adding, for example a journal article has information associated with it which we need to create a reference – info such as the title of the paper, the author(s) name(s), the date it was published and the journal name. The good news is that when you add a new item, Zotero automatically searches for the metadata on the web. It is available roughly 90% of the time for articles published in the last 20 years or so. The rest of the time, it will have some, but not all, of the info.

Editing Metadata is necessary when some, or all, of the item info is not automatically added to Zotero. Click the entry for the item in your library (see above), which displays the item’s metadata in the right-side panel. Clicking inside this panel allows you to enter info or in some cases, such as item type, to select from a drop-down menu.

This is the most important step of adding an item to your Zotero library. When you ask it to create a citation or reference page for you, it will pull the necessary info from this panel. If this info is absent or incorrect, the citation will also be incorrect!

Using the APA references handout(s), identify the correct type of item that you have (most often this is a journal article). Now, look to see what info is included in a citation for that item type – make sure that the corresponding fields in the metadata in Zotero are filled out and accurate!

Here is another helpful resource for identifying what is needed for APA 7 APA Manual - 7th edition examples

3.5 Creating Citations

To create individual citations, simply right click on the item’s entry in your library, select “Create Bibliography from Items…”, choose APA 7th edition, and copy to clipboard. You can now paste it into Word (or anywhere else). See this guide for more details

Starting with Zotero 8, the Word/LibreOffice plugin uses a new unified citation dialog. You can search for items by title, creator, or year in List mode, or browse specific collections in Library mode. The old “red bar” and “classic” dialogs have been replaced by this single, more flexible interface.

Again, using the Word plugin is infinitely more efficient, you can find those instructions here: https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage

3.6 Creating Items Manually

We can’t always find that PDF of an article we are looking for, sometimes it’s behind a paywall or it simply doesn’t exist on the web. Maybe you want to cite an encyclopedia, but can’t get the PDF of the whole thing, or even the entry… no problem. What we want to do here, is still be able to use Zotero to create the citation for us, so we will manually add an item to our library. In this case, the item won’t actually contain the PDF, but this will allow us to add the metadata by hand so that Zotero can create the citation.

Use this guide featured below to create the item. And then, refer to the metadata sections above to add the relevant info.