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Zotero

Guide to Zotero, a free citation management tool.

Creating Your Bibliography from the Zotero Three-Column Panel

To create a bibliography:

  • Select the items in the Middle Panel or the collections in the Left Panel that you would like to include in your bibliography
  • Once the items or collections are highlighted, right-click on the selected items
  • Choose Create Bibliography from Selected Items (or Create Bibliography from Collection).  A new dialog box will appear:


     
  • Choose the citation style you would like to use for your bibliography from the pull-down list
  • Choose the output format for saving your document
  • Click OK
     

NOTE: You can also just drag and drop your references from the Zotero middle panel into your document.  They'll turn into fully-formatted citations. This works with any word processor including Google Docs.

Creating In-text Citations & Bibliographies

Select Citation Style

1. Navigate to Zotero Preferences

 

2. Click "Export"

 

3. Choose your preferred style using the drop-down menu under "Default Format"

 

Insert In-text Citations - Author/Date format

1. In Zotero, click on the source you want to cite

2. While pressing the Shift key, drag the source from Zotero to the place you'd like the in-text citation to appear

Insert In-text Citations - Footnotes

1. In Google Docs, click 'Insert' -- 'Footnote'

2. Drag and drop the correct citation from Zotero into the Google Doc where the footnote appears at the bottom of the page

Insert Bibliographies or Full Citations

Option 1: In Zotero, highlight all sources you want to include in your bibliography. Then right-click and select "Create Bibliography from Items." Follow the prompts to create your bibliography and paste it into your document.

 

Option 2: Drag and drop sources from Zotero WITHOUT holding the Shift key to insert the full citation. You can highlight many sources in Zotero and drag them into document all at once.

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