Alright, today we'll be talking about Zotero, which is a research management tool which allows you to collect all the bibliographic information you need about the sources that you're using, organize those sources into collections that make sense to you, and then you can generate footnotes, endnotes, citations in your text, as well as bibliographies or references list at the end of your paper, and you can sync all of your items between your personal computer and any other computers that you use with your online zotero.org account. So this is what it's going to look like. You'll see several windows. Once you've downloaded Zotero and you're working in there, on the left you'll see all of your libraries and collections - however you have chosen to organize your items. In that middle window, you'll see all the items in whatever collection or library you have selected and in the right-hand column, you will see all the details for whichever item you have selected from within your library or a collection. You can see there on the right-hand side all the citation information that you might need about a given source as well as some stuff that you might not need, such as the abstract, the language, the journal abbreviation, some other information that you may or may not need for your given citation style. But this is what you'll be looking at when you're using Zotero. Like I said earlier, Zotero allows you to collect sources that you will be using with several very easy, simple methods, some as easy as a single click. You can then organize those items in any way that you choose, and then you can cite those items in your papers in any style you might need, including APA, MLA, Chicago, SBL, all sorts of citation styles, and of course you can sync those items between your online account and any computers that you use with Zotero on them. You can also do some collaboration online with other users, and you can rest easy knowing that Zotero is open-source, and therefore it is constantly being updated and made better and better and, of course, for free. So now we've gone over what Zotero is. We can just click download, and we can go ahead and get started. I'm using a Mac, so Zotero will automatically suggest which version you need to download. So I'm going to click download here. While that's downloading, I'm also going to download the Zotero connector. And again, Zotero's website will look at whatever browser you're using and recommend the appropriate one. So I'm going to download that at the same time and get that going. So I'm going to add that to Chrome I'm going to let it do all of its things, and we're good to go. So I'm going to click out of here and go back to Zotero. If you haven't yet, you'll need to register for an account in that top right corner. Click register on Zotero's website. Okay, so once you've downloaded Zotero, as well as a Zotero connector for your preferred browser, and you've registered for an account, and you've opened the Zotero app and logged into your account, this is what you'll see: a big, scary, empty library with nothing in it. There are some helpful QuickStart guides and a reminder to install that Zotero connector for your preferred browser, as well as a reminder to set up syncing so that you can connect your online account with any computers that you use for your work. Now we'll go through how to add items to your collection so that you can begin to actually do your research and organize those items and start to insert citations and bibliographies into your papers. Main way to add items is to come up here and click on this green button that says "new item." You can then select what source type you're using. These are the most common ones, but there are many more to choose from. This is one of the most important parts of building your library in Zotero; make sure that you select the appropriate source type so that when Zotero goes to create footnotes and citations and bibliographies for you, it gives you the correct type of citation for that source. So select whatever source you're using. So let's start with the most basic version, a book, and you can then begin to fill out that information manually. So you type in the title of the book, type in the author's last name and first name, any other information that you'll need for the citations in whatever style you are using. You don't need to fill in all of these fields. You only need to fill in what you actually need for your bibliography. For most styles that means that you need to include obviously the title, the author's name, as well as the place where it was published and who published it and when they published it. Some other citation styles need you to give things like the numbers of pages. If it's part of a series, name the series. If there are multiple volumes, tell us which volume that is, tell us what edition it is. Any information that you can give is helpful, but keep in mind you don't have to fill in all of these. So don't be intimidated by the sheer number of fields available to fill in. That's how to do it manually, and it's important to know how to do it manually because sometimes the automatic ways don't work perfectly. So let's delete this item and do things a little bit more simply. The easiest way to add items is with this magic wand button next to the new item button. Once you click that, this field pops up and you can type in or paste in ISBNs, doi's, and other digital IDs for your sources, and Zotero will automatically populate those items into your library. Avery easy way to find those ISBNs for any books that you might be using is to actually go to Amazon, which has a very thorough and detailed database, and just find whatever source you want to be using. So I'm just gonna look up a book that I and a friend of mine have been reading recently, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the way the Church Views Racism. And we're going to scroll down here because Zotero will or - Amazon rather - will give us the ISBN. So I'm just going to copy this ISBN. We're going to go back to Zotero, we'll click the magic wand, paste the ISBN, hit enter, and there's my book with all of the citation information that I need for any of the major styles that I might use, including APA, Chicago, SBL, or MLA. Another way that you can add items (and again coming from Amazon) another way that you can add items is using the Zotero connector, which we downloaded earlier. For most major browsers, the Zotero connector shows up right here as a little icon that matches whatever source type you're looking at. So let's just find another book. We'll go down to related books. How about this one, How to Think about the Divine, and we'll let Zotero pull that information using the connector. So I'm just gonna let it save to my library. I'll go back to Zotero, and there's my source. It pulled all the information that I need, including the title, the author, the edition, the place, the publisher, the date that it was published. I pulled some extra information that I probably won't need for my citations, including the language, the number of pages, and an abstract from Amazon. I'm not going to need that information, but just for now, I'm gonna leave it in Zotero. Those are two very easy ways to add items to your library. A lot of your research will probably be done in APU's library databases. So let's go there now. So now we're looking at some of APU's databases that are accessible to all APU students and faculty and staff. Academic search premier is a good generic one that has lots and lots of sources available to us. I'll log in with my APU account. So now we're looking at one of APU's databases accessible to students and faculty and staff. This one is academic search premier. This is a good database for all sorts of topics. I'm just gonna type in some random search terms that I'm interested in. And this text looks interesting, so I'm gonna click on this one and just like I showed earlier with that book on Amazon, up here, the Zotero connector has identified that this is a journal article, so the icon now looks like a little piece of paper like you might imagine a journal looks like. So again I'm just going to save this to my library, let Sottero do its thing for a moment, and then I'm gonna go take a look and there is my journal article, The Art of The Lord of the Rings: A Defense of the Aesthetic, the author's name, the abstract, the publication, which is the journal title, all the rest of the information that I am going to need for my footnotes, citations, and bibliography. What it has also done is actually downloaded the PDF of that article so that I don't have to maintain my bibliographic information in one place on my computer and my files on another place. I can use Zotero to organize all my bibliographic information as well as the full PDF text of journal articles and other things that I would like to be reading for my research. So it's a very helpful and easy and intuitive way to organize all of the materials you need for your research. Now that I've got several items in my library, I think I'd like to go and actually organize those into collections that make sense to me based on the projects that I'm working on. So to add collections to my library, I'm going to come up here and click this button that looks like a manila folder. I'll click "new collection" and I'll title this - let's say this is for my theology paper - I'll click OK, and now I'm looking in that collection, and there's nothing in it. So I go back to my library, and I want to put both this book and this book into my theology paper folder, so I put those there and they stay in my library, but they are also in this collection now. So after a while when I've added lots and lots of resources to my library, instead of digging through that large library for the sources I need, I can look at things organized by topic. So I can add another collection as well for the other types of sources that I'm doing - the other types of sources that I'm reading - and again I can go back to my library, and I can put various items in various collections. I can also have multiple items in multiple collections. So for example, in my libraries, all the sources I've added, and this book titled Trouble I've Seen, is in both of the collections I've created so far. So when you create items in the library, you can organize them into as many collections as you'd like in whatever system makes sense to you for organizing your library. As well as collecting the bibliographic information that you need for sources along with full-text PDF files, you can also add notes and tags to aid in your collection and organization of your research. So for example, if I've got some quotes or ideas that I want to remember from this particular book, I can click notes, I can add a note, and I can type up whatever quotes I want to keep on hand attached to that specific entry or item in my library. So that way again I don't have to maintain my bibliographic information in one place on my computer and my files in another place and my notes in a third place. I can do all of it from within Zotero. You can also add tags to help organize your paper so that if you are looking for a particular source or a particular quote from one of those sources that you've recorded here in Zotero, you can add tags and then search for those tags up here in this search bar. You might notice in the bottom left corner that Zotero automatically adds some tags for some of the things that you save from around the web. So for example, if I want to look at everything in my book on theology or everything in my library on theology, I can click here, and this article is automatically tagged with that tag theology and literature. So it's another way that you can organize your library in a way that may sense to you using notes and tags. Now that we've built out our library. we can go ahead and open up Microsoft Word or any other word processor, and we can start to use Zotero to automatically create footnotes or in-text citations as well as bibliographies at the end of our papers. So I'm going to go ahead and open up Microsoft Word. So I've got a quote that I want to use in my paper, so I type up that quote or I paste it from my notes. Now I'm ready to add my citation, so I leave my cursor exactly where I want my citation to be, I come up here and I've clicked on the Zotero menu. Now I click on "add citation." The first time you add a citation in any paper or any document, Zotero's going to ask you what style you want to use for your citations. For this example, I'm gonna use the APA style. And it's only going to ask me once for this particular paper Now Zotero is prompting me to search for whatever item I want to cite. So let's say I want to cite the paper I found earlier on Lord of the Rings. I punch in some search terms, I click on the source I want to use, I add my page number for my quoted material, I hit enter, and I let Zotero do its thing and automatically create my citation. The last thing I have to do for APA style is add a period after my citation and we're good to go. It's as simple as that to add citations or footnotes to your papers in Word or in Google Docs or other word processors using Zotero. I'll add some other . . . let's say we have a paraphrased idea or material, and I want to again quote or paraphrase or cite according to APA style. Same thing, I'll add here, and we'll cite another book that we had found in our research, hit enter, and there's my APA style citation followed by a period. It's as easy as that to add items and footnotes and citations to your papers Once you're done drafting your paper, and you've got all your citations in place in the text itself, you can go ahead and prep your bibliography. So for now I'm to insert a page break so that my bibliography is at the top of the next page. I'm going to come up here and I'm going to click "add bibliography" and Zotero is going to read my paper and look for all the citations I've used and automatically create my references list in APA style. Now that we've added our bibliography, we can see why it's so important to know how to create references lists and bibliographies and citations according to whatever writing style we're using without the aid of tools like Zotero. So for example, this number seems suspicious. I'm not sure this is the 59,000th edition, so we're just going to go in and update that information so that it doesn't show the edition number. Now what I could do is I could just put my cursor in there and delete this information, but instead what I want to do is update Zotero so that next time I cite that book in a paper, I don't have to do this work again. So I'm going to undo that, and I'm going to go back to Zotero now and actually update my entry for this particular book. So here we don't need this edition number because it's not accurate, so I'm just going to delete it, and I'm going to go back to Word and click "refresh." Zotero thinks for a moment, and it looks at all the changes I made within Zotero and updates the paper accordingly. Like I've said earlier Zotero is very easy, pretty intuitive, and very convenient for all types of research needs. It's very easy to use. It's very easy to get started, doesn't take much to begin to build your library and then to begin using Zotero to save a lot of time while writing papers by automatically inserting your citations and your bibliography or references list. It's very easy, and it's very useful, and it will probably become your new best friend if you make use of it. Of course, if you've got questions, please feel free to visit the Writing Center and mention that you'd like to talk about Zotero.
