"Z" is for Zotero

Back in Fall 2017 I took an Inquiry & Measurement for practitioners course. After a 14 year hiatus from the academic world, my research skills were admittedly a little rusty and I was naturally a bit anxious about the prospect of having to format proper citations and keep track of dozens of articles. I couldn’t remember the last time that I had set foot in a library for the purpose of finding journal articles for research and any technique or strategy that I once used had long since been forgotten. Fortunately, the instructor of the course provided some tips for using the library including some recommended tools. One of those tools was Zotero.

[zoh-TAIR-oh] 

I admit, I was initially intrigued by the name but later came to appreciate the features it offered. In plain terms, Zotero is a reference manager and it can store and manage bibliographic references like books and articles. But more than that, Zotero is a powerful research companion for organizing all types of information and sources.

Zotero’s power comes from its ability to manage metadata - essentially, information about the information being stored and organized. Every type of item contains different metadata, this includes things like titles, creators, publishers, dates, page numbers, tags, notes and any other data needed to cite the item or to make it more useful when searching for it in the future. Speaking of citations, one of the tedious time consuming tasks of any research project is ensuring citations are properly formatted. Thankfully, Zotero instantly creates references and bibliographies with over 8,000 citation styles. It even has plugins for direct integration in word processing software making it easy to create citations directly from within Word or LibreOffice.

One of the tasks that can quickly get out of hand with any research project is keeping track of all the references and knowing why you saved them. Zotero lets you easily organize your items into collections. The main program window is split into three panes. The left pane is your library. Here you can organize all of your items and put them into different collections - much like a music playlist. Items that are stored in collections are links to a single copy of the item in your library. This way, the same item can belong to multiple collections at once.

Screenshot of Zotero client application

The middle pane shows you the contents of a collection, with all of the items and any attachments they have. Notes, files and links that are attached to an item will appear beneath the parent item. The right pane shows the metadata associated with each item. The type of metadata displayed will vary depending on the type of item that was saved. All of these fields can be edited and it may be necessary to correct an entry or fill in missing information to have a complete citation generated, but most of the time they are complete and accurate.

Items can be manually added to your library, but one of the best features about Zotero is that it can automatically capture and save items you find with the click of a button. With the Zotero Connector for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, Zotero can automatically create an item using the embedded metadata from the site and, when available, Zotero will even download a full-text PDF and save it with the item. Zotero also lets you assign tags to help identify items and make them easier to find later on.

Finally, Zotero allows you to create shared group libraries that make it possible to collaboratively manage research sources and materials. What’s cool is that you can sync these shared group libraries to your account, so that they show up in your client application. You can also access them online, which is great for times when you need to look something up that you saved from a different computer. Group members can attach notes with the items they save which can really help with identifying how an item relates to the purpose of the project, such as specifying a page range or even listing a perfect quote.

At the time, I didn’t know Zotero had this function and it would have been a great way to collaborate on our group research project. Instead we relied on storing files in a shared Google drive, which, I found myself having to open multiple files to find the one I wanted because all I had to go on was the filename, which wasn’t always the most descriptive.

Out of curiosity, I created a public group for EME6414 and added a few interesting articles. Feel free to register for Zotero and join the group if you’re interested. Once you join, you’ll be able to see the items that have been saved as well as add your own. Leave a comment and let me know if you’ve tried Zotero (or other reference management tool) and what you thought of it.