Zotero is a citation manager. It’s free, open source, and really great.
If you do any significant amount of writing, I highly recommend getting it and starting to use it. The sooner you incorporate it into your research and writing process, the sooner you’ll have all your stuff in it when you need it later.
I first started using Zotero around the middle of 2012, according to my citation library. I was in the middle of an MBA and wanted to be able to cite my references more easily. I’d looked at other options like just taking my own notes, browser bookmarks, tools like Evernote, and Mendeley, a commercial citation manager.
In 2013, Mendeley got bought by Elsevier, the extractive academic publisher that wants to charge you a gazillion dollars for 24 hours of access to research that was paid for with public money. And they charge researchers to publish their research. And expect researchers to peer-review other people’s work for free. It’s a bizarre and arse-backwards business model that I cannot believe academics tolerate. But academia is a bizarre and abusive place to be, by all accounts, to learned helplessness is the norm there, I guess.
But I digress.
Why A Citation Manager?
I started using Zotero for two main reasons:
- To generate citations and bibliographies in a formal style without having to do a lot of work.
- To note down things that I read that I wanted to cite later on.
Zotero supports a huge number of citation styles used by major academic journals, universities, and a bunch of others. Like the Australian Guide to Legal Citation, which I started using when government departments tried to deny my FOI requests. Now I get to cite my own legal cases that I’ve saved in Zotero.
Zotero takes your saved references and generates citations in the style you’ve selected. They can be footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, whatever you like. You can export them in a variety of standard formats (like BibTex) to use with other tools. Zotero will also import references from other tools via these formats. This made migrating my citations from Mendeley easy, way back when, so I didn’t need to start over from scratch.
But the second reason is what came to be more important to me as I used Zotero more, and as it improved over the years.
Getting A Citation Habit
Over time, I accumulated a lot of citations. Now I can use Zotero to organise them into nested folders (called Collections) based on whatever hierarchy makes sense to me. I can drag them into a new folder if I’m working on something specific, or leave them scattered all over the place and rely on inbuilt search to find something I read back in 2014.
Zotero has a plugin for Firefox, my browser of choice, which will save whatever I’m reading to Zotero with a single click. And it autodetects (most of the time) the type of citation so it saves the fields that I’ll need later on when I cite what I just read. This makes it pretty seamless to just save whatever I find that’s interesting in case I want to refer to it later.
Zotero also has plugins for Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and LibreOffice to insert citations straight into your document, in the correct style and that get updated if you edit the reference data in Zotero. The Google Docs one can be a little bit fiddly at times, mostly because of how permissions work (complicated by my aggressive anti-surveillance measures that delink cookies constantly) but the LibreOffice integration works great.
And you can share your citations with other people with online Zotero Groups, if you want. You can share your references publicly, or have a private little group you collaborate with. Perfect for the group projects that everyone hates, or just to share neat stuff you can link people to in the group chat.
Zotero also now has an inbuilt PDF viewer with notes and highlights support. I can read some boring document and highlight it as I go, taking notes in the moment, knowing that I can come back to them later on. I can cite some pithy phrase I found, or note some weird statement by a government department or politician, and cite the source for others to verify if they want to.
Get Amongst It
Zotero isn’t perfect, but it has made my life significantly better. I really don’t want to go back to manually tracking citations or hand-editing the bibliography in a document. There’s no need!
For me, so far, Zotero has been a great example of why I prefer open source software. Citation management is a bit of a nerdy niche thing to worry about, but here’s a tool that just keeps chugging away solving the problem for me and others. It does the job in front of it, without trying to take over the world or shoehorn weird get-rich-quick features into the thing.
But most importantly, Zotero helps me look smarter than I really am by helping me organise my work.
If you do any significant amount of writing, for business or pleasure, I highly recommend checking out Zotero to see if it will work for you, too.
Zotero aren’t paying me anything, I’m just a fan. I actually pay them money for a storage account to help back up my citations.