What is Zotero?

"Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources." – www.zotero.org 

Zotero has two main forms: an add-on for Mozilla Firefox, and a standalone application. Your saved citations can be archived and shared between copies of the software with an online (free) account on zotero.org.

Zotero is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. There is a Zotero connector add on for Chrome, Safari and Opera browsers (but not for Internet Explorer). Plugins available for Microsoft Word and LibreOffice/OpenOffice/NeoOffice allow you to easily insert citations into your word-processing documents.

Zotero provides a great introduction in its Quick Start Guide.

Steps for starting with Zotero:

1. Decide whether to start with the Mozilla version or the standalone version.
2. Install the version of your choice.
3. Create an account on Zotero.org https://www.zotero.org/user/register  to back-up and sync your citation collections.
4. If you're not using the Mozilla version, install the helper app on the browser you do use.
5. Begin importing citations
6. Install the helper app for your word processor
7. Begin inserting citations in your written documents

Gathering citations in Zotero:

There are a number of ways to gather citations and put them in your Zotero database

• Use the Zotero helper icon to import information from a database or book/article website (such as Google Books, Worldcat, 
• Look up the item by standard number (ISBN, DOI, etc) through Zotero
• Drag in a PDF and have it generate a citation from it (this requires add-on tools be installed) 
• Download and import citations in .RIS format from a database

Retrieving Metadata for PDF

This will only work with documents where the metadata is encoded in the PDF, such as articles downloaded from online journals.

• Type it in by hand