This guide is created by Jason Puckett and licensed by Georgia State University Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License.
You may reproduce any part of it for noncommercial purposes as long as credit is included. I encourage you to license your derivative works under Creative Commons as well to encourage sharing and reuse of educational materials.
Zotero (pronounced "zoh-TAIR-oh") is an application that collects, manages, and cites research sources. It's easy to use, connects with your web browser to download sources, and best of all it's free.
Zotero allows you to attach PDFs, notes and images to your citations, organize them into collections for different projects, and create bibliographies.
If you need a quick bibliography but not the complete Zotero management system, check out ZoteroBib!
To use Zotero, you'll need to install two things:
Both of these are available from Zotero.
Download and install Zotero from the Zotero website.
(There's a different version for each operating system: Windows, Mac or Linux.)
Connectors allow your web browser to save citations to your Zotero library.
The Zotero downloads page should automatically detect what browser you're using and give you a link.
Each browser has its own version of the Zotero connector, so if you use Chrome, Firefox and Safari you'll need to install all three.
