Zotero

What is Zotero?

Zotero is a free, open-source reference manager designed to help researchers collect, organize, cite, and share literature and research materials. Developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, it is widely used across disciplines for managing bibliographies and integrating citations into documents.

At a glance, Zotero is:

  • Easy to use — drag-and-drop PDFs, automatic metadata extraction, browser connector for one-click imports
  • Organized and flexible — collections, tags, saved searches, and built-in PDF annotation
  • Integrated with all major writing tools — Word, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Typst, LaTeX, Quarto
  • Collaborative — group libraries for teams, projects, and courses
  • Extensible — a large plugin ecosystem (Zotfile, Better BibTeX, mdnotes, Zeta Bibliotheca, etc.)
  • Open and free — transparent, community-driven, no subscription required

Zotero offers a single, unified place to manage all your literature and citations, making it easy to stay organized and produce clean, consistent bibliographies.

Why Zotero?

Managing literature manually quickly becomes chaotic: PDFs scattered in folders, inconsistent naming, missing metadata, and manual citation formatting errors. Zotero provides structure and automation that dramatically improves research workflows.

Zotero is essential because it provides:

  • Centralized reference management — one library for all papers, books, datasets, websites, and reports
  • Accurate, consistent citations — thousands of CSL citation styles with automatic formatting
  • Better collaboration — shared libraries for teams, labs, or course groups
  • A reproducible workflow — stable identifiers, consistent metadata, export formats for manuscripts and analysis pipelines
  • Integration with open science tools — seamless use with Typst, Quarto, LaTeX, R Markdown, and more
  • A research memory — annotations, notes, and tags that help track insights and connections

In short, Zotero turns citation management from a burden into an organized, reliable part of your research workflow, enabling more reproducible and efficient writing.

Exercise: Import References into Zotero

Goal: Learn how to add research items to your Zotero library and organize them.

Instructions:

  1. Install Zotero and the Zotero Connector for your browser.
  2. Open a research article (e.g., PubMed, arXiv, journal website).
  3. Click the Zotero browser connector button to import the reference.
  4. In Zotero, check that the metadata looks correct.
  5. Drag the reference into a collection for today’s workshop.
  6. Add a tag and write a short note summarizing the paper.

Outcome: You have a structured, searchable reference in your Zotero library.

Bonus: Import the DOI you generated for your zenodo asset.

Exercise: Use Zotero to create a bibtex bibliography

Goal: Learn how to create a bibtex library.

Instructions:

  1. Install Better BibTeX (BBT) in Zotero.
  2. Right-click your collection → Export collection → choose Better BibLaTeX.
  3. Save the file as references.bib.

Outcome: You can now use the Zotero references directly in your LaTEX or Typst documents.

Further Reading

Slides