Technology and the Reading Specialist (EDGRS 521): Citing Your Sources

Zotero

Zotero is a powerful tool that allows you to collect, organize, cite, and share your research material.

A personal research assistant

Zotero is the only research tool that automatically senses content, allowing you to add it to your personal library with a single click. Whether you're searching for a preprint on arXiv.org, a journal article from JSTOR, a news story from the New York Times, or a book from your university library, Zotero has you covered with support for thousands of sites.

Store and organize anything

Zotero collects all your research in a single, searchable interface. You can add PDFs, images, audio and video files, web-page snapshots, and really anything else. Zotero automatically indexes the full-text content of your library, enabling you to find exactly what you're looking for with just a few keystrokes. You can create folders, subfolders, keyword tags and Relate items.

Cite perfectly

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. 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.

Download the software from http://www.zotero.org/

View a brief tutorial on capturing material using Zotero. Capturing web page text and special pages.

View a brief tutorial on organizing materials using folders and subfolders, tags, and related links in Zotero.

View a brief tutorial on using Zotero to add references and create a bibliography in Word.

Tips & Tricks

• Create an account using the online cloud service. (Save the login information to sync your tools.)
• If you only want to use the web version ... you can use the Bookmarklet to add materials. (This is good for working from non-SXU public locations, but you will not have all the features available in the client version.)
• Download the client software for more powerful options ... such as integration with your word processor. (The Firefox version integrates much better; you will need to reboot to see the Z icon and features appear.)
• Download the linker to work with Word (to merge information into references and bibliographies).
• Run the client on your workstation, choose the Z on the top right, select the gear icon, then Preferences, then Sync ... add the account information (using your password from above)
• then in Preferences, under Search, install the checker ... to automatically index the full text materials you download.
• NOTE: If you use Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer ... you will need to use the Standalone version ... and install a connector.
• NOTE: If you cannot load the software on your workstation ... you can still use the Bookmarklet to add materials to a default file, but you must log into the cloud version. (This is good for working from non-SXU public locations.)