Zotero: Home

News from the official Zotero blog.

Does Murphy Library offer support for citation management systems such as Zotero?

Murphy Library does not endorse or support any particular citation management systems. Because many people on campus use Zotero, Murphy Library created this guide to help answer questions and lead people to useful resources.

The library does not offer workshops or classes in Zotero or citation management systems. 

We encourage people to use the resources in this guide to learn how to use Zotero and find answers to Zotero-related questions.

What Zotero Does

Zotero (pronounced "zoh-TAIR-oh") is a Firefox addon (don't have Firefox? Download Firefox here) that collects, manages, and cites research sources. It's easy to use, lives in your web browser where you do your work, 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 using Word or OpenOffice.

Since it's a Firefox plugin, it automatically updates itself periodically to work with new online sources and new bibliographic styles.

Using This Guide

This guide is several pages long -- use the tabs across the top to navigate through topics, or the "Print Entire Guide" link in the bottom right to print the whole thing. 

Zotero Quick Start Guide

Check out this great guide published by the Zotero developers. Also available as a PDF.

Here is a short but comprehensive Zotero product review written by the health science librarian Katie Harding from University of Sakatchewan.

Zotero will run on any operating system. It requires Mozilla Firefox 3.0 or greater. Installation only takes a few seconds. Don't worry. Just go to the website and the installation is easy and short for a minute.

To install, go to http://www.zotero.org/ and click the red "Download" button. Click "Install Now" and follow the instructions.

If you see the message “Firefox prevented this site from asking you to install software on your computer," click "Allow".

Restart Firefox and you're all set! You'll see a small Zotero button at the bottom of your Firefox window.

If you have any problems, check the Zotero installation page.

You'll probably also want to download and install the Microsoft Word citation plugin (or the OpenOffice plugin if you're using OpenOffice). These allow you to easily cite items from your Zotero library in your papers.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants; I thank Jason Puckett, Instruction Librarian at Georgia State University for my re-use and revision of his Zotero LibGuide.  Other information comes directly from Zotero.

This guide is licensed by Georgia State University Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.