00:00The first step we need to take before using Zotero is to download it

00:02So, if you go to zotero.org from a web browser, it must be Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Opera

00:15Unfortunately, it does not work with Internet Explorer, but from any of the other four, if you go to zotero.org, you will see on the homepage a large link to download it

00:29If you click on that button, you will be taken to the download page

00:35You need both of these components for Zotero to work properly

00:41The component on the left is the application that is downloaded to your hard drive, so this is the part that takes up some space in order to store your files

00:52The connector helps bridge between the research you're finding on the internet and getting that information into Zotero

01:00Into the Zotero application on your hard drive

01:16Now that Zotero is downloaded, we can set up a few things that will help us use it most efficiently

01:23So, if you open up the application on your computer for me, I'm going to go to the Start menu and search for Zotero, and I can find it under Programs

01:36From here, you can go to the Preferences menu, which you'll find under the Edit option and the toolbar, so Edit and Preferences

01:48There are a few things to set up here

02:00The first is the sync feature, which is the second tab on the top of the window, and this is where you can enter a login for the Zotero.org website

02:12I highly recommend creating a free account if you don't yet have one

02:17You can do so by clicking on the 'Create Account' link, and this… It allows you to sync your citations and any attachments, such as PDFs, onto the Zotero cloud server so that you have a backup in case something happens to your computer

02:38It also helps you sync across devices, so let's say sometimes you work on a desktop computer at home, but then for school or work, you use a laptop

02:49Setting up your account and entering it here on all the computers you use will help you stay organized and up to date across all those machines

03:02The other option I recommend setting up is found in the Cite part of the menu

03:10You can see there are several styles already located in my Style Manager

03:17These are different citation styles that I have added or that come with Zotero, so if you just installed it..

03:29You'll probably just see some of the basic ones like APA, MLA, Chicago, or things like that

03:34However, there are lots more that you can add, so if there is a style that you need for a journal or for an assignment, you can find those online

03:45There's an easy link right here called "Get Additional Styles," and that will bring you to the page where you can search for and add additional citation styles

03:56 Now that we've set up those preferences, we can close this dialog box

04:02Okay, now we're almost ready to start collecting citations, but before I do that, I like to create a new folder for the different projects I'm working on

04:16To do that, you can go to the top left, where it says "New Collection," and then just click the button

04:26It will then prompt you to name the new folder

04:36You to enter a name, so I am going to just put "Test Folder." Okay, now you'll see that this is empty, in contrast to my library, which does have some items

04:46These are just examples that I've saved during other teaching sessions

04:48If you have just downloaded Zotero, your library will be empty, but the difference between a folder and a library is that anything you put in a folder will automatically be added to your master library as well

05:06You can also just save items directly to your library if you prefer, but I do recommend setting up individual folders so that you can keep yourself organized

05:19I'm here; I'm going to minimize the desktop application, so make sure not to close it because we do need it to run in the background

05:29I just want to move it out of the way, really, while we gather our research

05:33So here I have the library website, and I'm on one of our database pages

05:41Here's a listing of some of our popular databases

05:45We also have an A to Z list if there's something too obscure that you'd like to know more about, but if you're not sure where to start, I definitely recommend checking out these popular databases

05:58I am going to look at this ProQuest Sadtec Collection as an example, so I'm clicking on it

06:09It is very important, if you are accessing databases from off-campus, to go through the library website because this will direct you through the proxy server and ensure that you can access it

06:22Otherwise, you'll probably receive an error saying you don't have access

06:26Make sure to use the proper credentials or something similar, so always go through the library website to access our databases

06:33From here, I can just run a basic search—it could be any search you like, for example, "circuit DAC." Now, you'll see that I have several results matching those search terms, and on this page alone, I have 20 different items that came up

06:58I can save these all at once to my Zotero library

07:01If your research style is to pull in everything at once and then review it later, then this method might be suitable for you

07:10In the top corner, you'll see a folder icon, and when I hover over it, it says "Save to Zotero." If I click on that folder, it will bring up the 20 results that appeared on this page, so I could select..

07:30All of them, I could just choose a few that I want to add, and if I say OK, you can see in the top right here, it's saving these items to my Test folder

07:48You can see that if it's able to get the PDF of the text, it's also saving that

07:55So, that's one way to save

07:58If you prefer to take an individual look at your articles before you save them, then I recommend saving them individually instead of using this folder icon

08:10For example, if I look at this first item, from here I could read the abstract; I could just take a closer look at it before I save it to my Research folder

08:22So, if it is something you'd like to save, instead of that folder icon—which appears when there are multiple citations on a page—we see this article icon instead

08:38If I click on that now, it's just saving the single item to my Test folder, and again, it is retrieving the PDF for me since we have access to the PDF in this database

08:53Well, back to my results

08:59So when you're searching, you probably will find some items where, instead of a PDF link, you see this option to Find Full Text

09:11So if you see that, I recommend clicking on it

09:15In this case, we don't have access to that article, but this brings you to the page where you can request it

09:25Once you receive a copy of the article, it's very easy to pull that into your Zotero library, and I will show you how to do that a little bit later on

09:36That's really all there is to saving citations that you find online

09:43This also works through Google Scholar, all the..

09:46Library databases, it works in the native catalog, so if you're using books or e-books, it can also capture that data for you

09:57It also works for just general websites, although usually there’s not quite as much data that it can obtain compared to journal articles or other pages that are written in a way that Zotero can extract a lot of data from

10:12But it all works exactly the same way, where you just click the icon, and it will always look a little bit different based on the type of screen or page you're on, but the same principle applies no matter what you're trying to save

10:30 So, now that we've saved some research into a folder in Zotero, we can go back to the desktop application

10:35I’m going to click on the Z button, and we can see some of..

10:42The items that we saved from online, from the database—so if I click on the entry for this first one on the right—there are several fields that it captured for us, and all of these fields can be edited

11:02So, if there's an issue with the title, perhaps it didn't capture something correctly, maybe it should be "The Whole Squirrel," you can change anything you need to in any of these fields

11:15The page number is not correct, or something like that

11:18Something that's nice to keep in mind is the author field

11:24In this case, we do have a traditional name field, so we have a first name and a last name

11:31But, say, for example, that your article or your research item was authored by a corporation or an organization; you can switch this to a single author field

11:45Small box right next to it will create one field

11:52So, say it was you know the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or something like that, where it doesn't follow the first-name last-name format, you can change that there

12:05You can also change it back since, in this case, I do want the two-field name

12:13Anything at all can be edited, including the type of article or item

12:19You can also add things manually, so this green plus sign where it says "New Item." I click on that, and I can add things manually

12:31This works really well for items that don't exist online, so say if you have an email that you're using as a reference, or you interviewed someone, or you have a map or something that's not easily found online

12:54Where you can just click the button to add things manually

12:57So, let's say if I have an email to add, it's adding that type for me

13:01You can see the little icon for an email, and then I can fill in these fields manually

13:08So, for example, if search 101 is a subject, and there is a last name, I just have the first initial

13:19You can manually fill in information as well

13:32The magic wand button, which is right next to it, can also add things for identifiers

13:37So, say if you have a DOI, for example, a PubMed ID, or a book ISBN, you could enter those here, and it will try to pull in data for you that includes the author names and all the details you would find online

13:56 I mentioned earlier that I would show you how to pull in a PDF, for example, if you had to request a PDF from interlibrary loan, and it..

14:06Came a little bit later, and now you're trying to put it in your folder, or maybe you already have a folder of PDFs that you saved previously, and you don't want to go through the hassle of locating them again online just to put them in Zotero

14:22It's very easy—just drag those files in

14:24So, I'm going to make this a little bit smaller

14:27I have an article saved on my desktop, a PDF article

14:29All I need to do is click on it, then drag it over to my folder, and let go

14:41Alright, and now Zotero will automatically try to locate metadata for that article

14:51You might have noticed that when I first pulled it in, it was simply named "article," which is not very descriptive, but Zotero automatically found the metadata for it and created a record in your..

15:08Folder, so here I have the PDF, which is just kind of existing as an attachment to the actual citation

15:15You can see this is what I could edit if I needed to, but it did pull the title for me, the author's all the details that I would have gotten if I had found it online, so that's a great time-saver

15:29Essentially, if you have several items that you've already saved, if you ever need to delete something from your library or your folder, it's very easy to do so

15:39You would just right-click on the item, and then you have the option of removing the item from your collection

15:49This would just take it out of your folder, but it would still exist in your master library

15:54Or if you want to get rid of something altogether, you can move the item to trash, and this will..

16:02Delete it entirely from your Zotero account

16:04So, those are the options for removing something

16:06The real value of Zotero comes from its ability to create bibliographies from the research you've saved

16:15There are two ways to do this

16:20One is a quick way to export a bibliography, and I will show you how to do that first

16:27So, let's say you have these items saved to your folder or to your collection

16:34You can right-click on that folder and then go to the "Create Bibliography from Collection" option

16:44One of the advantages of Zotero is that your citations are not stored in any particular format; just the data is stored

16:55Things like the journal title, authors, and so on are simply stored

17:00They’re not in a particular citation style, and it’s not until you actually export something that it prompts you to choose a style

17:12That’s a really great feature because if you end up needing to use a different style later on, but you're using the same references, you can do that

17:19So, let’s say that for this particular bibliography, I need to use the APA style

17:30I’m going to choose that, and I’d like my output mode to be a bibliography

17:34Then, I want my output method to be "Copy to Clipboard." I like this method because it’s just as if you were to press Control-C or Command-C to copy the text, and now it’s ready to paste anywhere you can paste text

17:55So you could paste it into a LaTeX document, a Google Doc, an email, and so on

18:00So, I’m going to..

18:05Copy it to my clipboard and say okay, and now I'm going to open Word so I can paste in my bibliography

18:11All right, and I'm just going to do Control + V to paste, just like a normal paste

18:21Okay, and now you can see that it copied everything that was in my folder, and it's in APA format

18:33Now, you might notice some errors, and unfortunately, every kind of citation tool will have some errors

18:41There's always some sort of user involvement needed to make sure everything's correct

18:50But if you do notice any errors or things you need to fix, definitely fix them back in Zotero, so just editing the items in the actual field

19:00That way, it will be ready to go for you next time, and you won't have to keep fixing it every time you copy and paste

19:15Bibliography: So, once you fix anything that you need to, just go through those same steps again

19:22Right-click on the folder and create a bibliography so that you get the corrected version

19:31You also can just choose individual articles to create a bibliography

19:39Say you didn't actually use all of these in your paper or assignment, you can just hold down the Shift key to select the items that you did use

19:48Then, using just those selected items, you could right-click and go through the same steps to create a bibliography

20:01 The other way of creating a bibliography is to insert your in-text citations as you go along writing a paper or an assignment

20:11Zotero can automatically generate a bibliography based on the citations you've used

20:18Citations that you use throughout your paper, so this is my preferred method because it helps me keep track of several citations, and since I need to insert those anyway while writing, it just makes the whole process a little bit easier

20:35So, I'm going to go back to my Word document, actually, and create a new document

20:41If you have Word on your computer, you should have noticed that there is now a Zotero tab located on the toolbar

20:57This was added when you installed Zotero, so I can just start writing what I need to

21:06I'm just going to say, "This is my first sentence." I go to the Zotero tab, and there is an "Add / Edit Citation" button

21:19If I click on that, it's going to ask me what style I would like to use for this particular..

21:29Every time you create a new document, it will check with you to see what style it should use

21:38I'm going to also use APA style for this, and I'm going to keep all of the other default settings the same, so I'll say OK

21:47Now you can see that a toolbar popped up for me to find the citation that I need to insert here

21:57You can just start typing anything about your article—if there was a word in the title you remember, or if it works an author, anything like that

22:09So, let's say this is my article that I need to use; it's inserted for me there

22:17I could say Enter, and you can see that it's inserted the in-text citation for me

22:21Alright, okay, so let's look at another example

22:30I'm going to type another sentence, I'm going to add another citation, and let's..

22:41Say that you are unable to recall anything about the article, you don't remember the author name off the top of your head or anything like that

22:53You can actually toggle—there are two different views you can switch between

22:55So, if I click on the Z button, and switch over to the Classic View, that will bring up a representation of my Zotero folder

23:08This view can be a little bit more helpful if you have multiple sources or maybe you have things saved in different locations

23:17Then you can navigate a little bit more easily

23:22So, let's say that I need to use these two articles; I click Done

23:24I can actually choose multiple sources, so you can see I want this article, and I'm just moving that over, and then it's adding it to the collection

23:47articles that it already had all right and I can add those by saying, OK, OK

23:55So, you can see that it added the in-text citations for me in the order that I wanted them to appear

24:02And the great thing about Zotero, one of the other great things, is that it knows that I already cited this article above

24:11And if you're familiar with APA style, you know that if there are four authors, the subsequent times that you cite that article, you simply use et al

24:25So, it's really great because Zotero kind of does that thinking for you, and you don't have to worry about going back to see if you've already cited something or if you end up changing the order of these sentences

24:40It will update to correctly reflect what the citation should be

24:43OK, so you can..

24:47Just go on like this, keep adding your in-text citations, and then you can either wait until the end to add your bibliography or you can place it in at any time because it will continue to update as you add more citations

25:09Instead of adding a citation manually as we have been doing, if I click on the "Add Bibliography" button, it will add the full references for only the articles I cited within my paper

25:24That's the reason I really enjoy this method, because I don't have to go in manually and see what I used

25:38If I use the tool to add citations, then Zotero knows what I used

25:40Now, again, if you do notice errors, fix them in Zotero because your Word document will continuously pull information from Zotero

25:52So, say that I need to change the..

25:59Capitalization for this article, for APA style, we actually use sentence case, where anything besides the first letter and the proper nouns are lowercase, but everything else is lowercase

26:18So, I'm just going through and fixing that since it wasn't correctly done when it pulled it in

26:30So, it looks like I fixed it, but if you save and close your document or the next time you add a citation or make any other change, it will refresh the document and just continually pull from Zotero

26:44So, just to show you, if I refresh the document, if you noticed, the changes I made actually just went back to what they were before

27:03So, you really want to go back and fix it here

27:05I can fix that by going to..

27:08The item, this is a nice shortcut for those of you who do use APA style

27:22If you right-click within the title, you have the option to transform text, and you can switch to sentence case

27:31Then, you can see that it took all the words and made the first letter lowercase

27:41Now, one caveat is that it can't recognize what is a proper noun

27:48For example, the Friends for Life program—believe that's a proper noun since it's the name of a specific program

27:58So, I'm going to go back and fix that here, and you could always check your article to see exactly what needs to be capitalized

28:08So, you do need to check for those proper noun instances, but I fixed it here

28:13Now, if I move this out of the way again, now if I refresh the… You can see that it's fixed to reflect what I put into Zotero

28:28Another benefit of using Zotero in this way is that if you need to change your style at some point—say you're writing an article that you are going to submit for publication to Word, and you end up changing your mind and need to submit it somewhere else, and you actually have to use a different style than what you have been typing in—it's very easy to change your style

28:43So, if I go to the document preferences at the top, I can change it to another style

28:58For example, say I actually needed to use IEEE; I just simply click on that style and select OK

29:12You can see that it changes my in-text citations and also my bibliography at the end

29:27So, those are all the major features

29:31Features of using Zotero: they are working on integrating this kind of in-text citation model into Google Docs

29:42However, at the time of this recording, it's still in beta testing, so it's not available just yet

29:50But do look out for that on the horizon if Google Docs is your preferred word processor

29:58I also do not know of a way currently to use this in-text citation method with LaTeX, so if you are writing a thesis, definitely check back with the library

30:10I will continue to make training and information available to help make it the most useful tool for you to use

30:20Please contact me if you have any questions about using Zotero or any other research questions

30:27Thank you so much for watching.