When performing research at the graduate level, it is important to be diligent about keeping track of your sources. This can be done with pen and paper in a dedicated notebook or on index cards. Or, you might just keep an Excel spreadsheet of all of the materials you are consulting for a project.

Citation managers like Zotero, RefWorks, and Mendeley help automate the process by working with your web browser to grab the information about a source (author, title, publication, etc.) with the click of a button. They can even be integrated into word processing software to automatically generate properly formatted citations and bibliographies.

Zotero is a research tool that was created for academics, by academics. It was created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and is currently maintained by Digital Scholar, a non-profit organization that creates academic software. Zotero is best used in Chrome or Firefox.

It is a suite of tools:

• the desktop application, which you’ll install on your computer
• a browser “connector” which captures the citation from the browser and saves it to the desktop application
• a word-processor add-in
• cloud storage for syncing/backing up

The citations you save in Zotero your library, but it is actually a database. Creating an online user account allows you to sync your library across multiple devices. Zotero stores your information centrally to the cloud (the Zotero server), so when you add or edit items in your library, in the desktop application, the changes will be synced to the Zotero server, so that your library is updated on all of your devices.

Note: the Zotero website is not the same as the Zotero application.

The website allows you to access your library without installing the application, so, for example, if you are working in the library and just want to look up a reference that you saved earlier. The online library doesn’t have all of the features we’ll be discussing in this tutorial.

1. Create an account.
2. Download Zotero 7 for Windows or Mac and open up the download package to install it.
3. You must also install the Zotero Connector for Chrome, Firefox or Safari (see step # 3 under installation). This is connects the information from the web browser to your desktop application.  Note: you can install the connector for all your browsers.

Before using Zotero for the first time, we need to set up our preferences and connect the standalone application to the browser connector.