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Library and Learning Services

Zotero: Organizing References

Reference management application designed to store and manage references.

Folders

Folder Icon

An easy way to visually organize your references is to create folders and subfolders. To add a folder, click the manila folder icon under the File menu and name it. You can also create folders with that folder by dragging and dropping folders into it.

Tags

Tags

Zotero has a tagging feature where you can further categorize and label your items. Frequently, Zotero will automatically add tags based on the subject terms of the reference.

Related Items

Related

In addition to collections and tags, a third way to express relationships between items is by setting up “relations”. Relations can be set up between any pair of items in a library (it is not possible to relate items from different libraries).

Some suggestions of how you could use this feature:

  • connect book chapters to their parent volume
  • connect book reviews to the book reviewed
  • link items that form parts of a single work (e.g., articles in a series)
  • link one item to another discussed in the Abstract or Notes fields
  • connect different versions of a work (e.g., connecting a conference presentation that eventually became an article and then eventually became a book)