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First steps

Let's get ready to Zotero

Zotero and its useful browser plugin, Zotero-Connector, are available on the official website. After downloading the current version of Zotero, follow the installation procedure as usual.

After starting Zotero, you will see the following program window. The program is divided into three areas (left, middle, and right).

  1. Collections (and subcollections) are helpful not to get lost in the sea of documents you gathered. You can create a collection for each article you write, projects you work on, or by topic. It is up to you. Learn How to create Collections.
  2. If you click on a collection, you see all its articles in the middle. By default, they are sorted by title. You can change the sorting order by clicking on the different column names. Additionally, you can add additional and/or custom columns - as demonstrated in the short video.
  3. On the right side, you can find information and metadata about the selected article.

Zotero Items

Zotero organizes documents as Items. Each item stores metadata of the added document, such as author, title, and year. You can add multiple attachments to each item, such as PDFs, Word documents, notes, and screenshots.

Adding your first article…

I know we were all anticipating this moment: it is finally time to add the first article. There are multiple ways to do so.

Adding documents (e.g. PDFs) manually

My preferred way is to add the document/PDF directly. Suppose you downloaded a document, drag and drop the file into Zotero. It will automatically create an entry item and add all the necessary information.

  1. If information is missing or incorrect, you can manually make adjustments on the right side.
  2. If Zotero doesn't create an entry from the PDF, right-click on the file and choose Retrieve Metadata for PDF

Importing documents via the browser

Use a browser plugin to import articles with your browser

  1. Install Zotero Connector for your browser of choice (available on the website)
  2. When using article databases, library catalogs, web search engines, and other resources, different icons will appear in your browser's menu bar. The article, book, or page icon in the address bar indicates that you are viewing a single item
  3. Click on the icon to import the information into your library (into the selected collection/subcollection). It also tries to download the article, if available.
  4. You can add web pages without articles in the same way. Zotero even screenshots the webpage (to deactivate screenshots, go to settings: Edit - Preferences - General - Automatically take snapshots when creating items from web pages).

Adding literature manually

Importing citations into your Zotero collections does not always work without hiccups. If no icon appears in the address bar or the information is not imported correctly, you may want to use a different option.
Use the little green + button to add an item manually. Select the item type from the drop-down menu and enter the item's bibliographic information in the item details panel.
If you already know the ISBN, Digital Object Identifier (DOI), or PubMed ID of the item, enter it using the magic wand button.

Other

To import libraries from other reference management tools into Zotero (like BibTex, RIS, RDF), start by exporting the bibliographic data from the other software program. To import the data into Zotero click on ‘File’ – ‘Import…’ (left upper corner).