Zotero Student Guide

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. Zotero can help you clip and cite books, articles, video clips, mp3 files, images, web pages and other resources and lets you choose from more than ten different citation styles (APA, MLA, Chicago, e.g.). You can link Zotero to Microsoft Word and other word processors to automatically generate a bibliography from the items you want to cite.

Zotero works by saving articles from journals, websites, and images directly from your web browser into the Zotero application on your computer. You can also, optionally, sync your Zotero library to a free online Zotero account, functionally storing what you cite in cloud storage.

Step 1: Download Zotero.

Step 2: Install Zotero connector for either Google Chrome, Safari, or Firefox.

Step 3 (optional): create your free Zotero account, and then link your account to your Zotero application (instructions under the “Data Syncing” heading).

Step 4: Get familiar with saving items and files to Zotero.

Step 5: Start researching with the handy Zotero Basics guide.