Slides for a hands-on Zotero workshop

One of the key tasks scientists need to master is how to manage bibliographic information: collecting relevant literature, building a digital library, and handling citations and bibliographies during writing.

This tutorial introduces Zotero (www.zotero.org), an easy to use reference management tool made by scholars for scholars. The tutorial covers the basics of using Zotero for collecting, organizing, citing and sharing research. Zotero automates the tasks of managing bibliographic data, storing and renaming PDFs, and formatting references. It also integrates with widely used text processors, and can synchronize your library across devices. There is no more need to search through disorganized file folders full of inscrutably named PDF files, to copy and paste references across documents, or to manually deal with pointless differences in citation styles. Ultimately, the point of using a reference manager is to free more time for real research.

Note: these are slides made for a hands-on workshop. They may not work well outside the context of a live Zotero demonstration. I share them because they may still contain some useful information.

8 thoughts on “Slides for a hands-on Zotero workshop”

  1. Thanks Mark a nice summary. I am relatively new to Zotero and beginning to love it for everyday work, not just scientific papers. Creating and managing my reference library is the key function for me.

  2. Hi Mark
    Thanks for putting your Zotero presentation on line. I am starting a PhD and have just started working with Zotero.
    One thing I am trying to figure out is the best way to take notes and extract them for later utilisation in your writing. Pre Zotero, working in one document, I would work with a single table in Word with a heading and citation for each article I am reading – with notes under specific themes.
    Do you use Zotero in combination with Word or do you just take and store notes in Zotero?
    What has worked best for you?
    Elroy
    Melbourne

  3. Hi Elroy,

    I take notes in many different places, but I ultimately store them in Zotero with the relevant references. The benefit is that you can use the search and tagging features for notes too. For instance, I use tags to keep track of good quotes I might want to use, and I copy and paste core arguments into notes so that I don’t have to go through a whole article again.

    Mark

  4. @Carol-Ann, I’m afraid it’s just the slides, so they may not all make sense outside the context of the hands-on workshop for which they were designed.

  5. Hello Mark. i’m a librarian (France, Lyon). Your slides above are remarquable; I saw the first version, and show several slide in training session; this one is perfect. Thanks for sharing under CC By :-) !

  6. What a great resource! I’m running a Zotero workshop at a conference next month and am really glad I found this for reference. Really well made. Thank you so much!!

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