Spotlight: Zotero

This Fall, we will be featuring a series of posts spotlighting different citation management tools. What is a citation management tool ? Citation management tools  are programs that enable you to keep track of your research, manage citations, generate bibliographies in various citation styles (e.g., APA, JAMA, Chicago), and organize PDFs. These tools work directly with word processing programs such as Word and Google Docs. They may also allow you to directly download and edit article PDFs, and insert figures with captions into manuscripts. Popular citation management tools includes EndNote, Mendeley and Zotero.

Our first post in this series will focus on the fabulous and free citation tool, Zotero!  As with other citation tools, Zotero allows you to collect and organize references, generate bibliographies and insert citations into a manuscript.

Additionally, Zotero allows you to:

  • import references from research databases and websites directly from your web browser of choice
  • automatically download PDFs that are featured on a website
  • sync  references between different computers and collaborate with other researchers by creating a Zotero account on zotero.org
  • store up to 3MB free of PDFs attached to references
  • merge duplicate references
  • insert citations into Libre Office

Zotero is freely available to all; you do not need a Tufts University UTLN and password or library login to download Zotero!

Want too learn more about Zotero and how to get started?