MFT 8302 : Principles of Educational Research: Zotero Instructions

Go to the Zotero Webpage

Creating an Account

1. Click on the login link.
2. Now click on Register for a free account
3. Create a username 
4. Type in your email address, then confirm it in next box
5. Create a password and verify in the next box
6. Put a checkmark in  the "I'm not a robot "box.
7. Click on blue Register button.

Downloading Zotero

1. Click on the Download Button
2. On the next page, click on the download button again to start the download process.
3. Zotero install file will appear in the lower left corner of the screen
4. Click on the up arrow in the Zotero download file
5. Click on Open
6. A new box will appear that says "Do you want this app to make changes to your computer?"  Click Yes
7. Zotero setup wizard will appear.  Follow the steps given to you by the setup wizard.
8. When installed, Zotero will open up in the main window, and the executable image will be displayed on your desktop.

Installing the Zotero Connector

The Zotero connector allows to to save citations to articles, books, webpages to Zotero with ease. Here's how to install the Connector.

1. The Zotero connector is a browser extension or add-on,  So first you have to choose the browser that you want to add the Zotero connector extension to.  The options are:    Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox.
2. Click on the Install button for your browser.
3. Follow instructions given for your browser to add the Zotero connector to your browser.

Syncing Zotero

By Syncing Zotero, you can access your saved citations from different computers. Here is how you sync Zotero:

1. In Zotero, click on Edit in the upper left corner.
2. In the drop-down menu, click on Preferences. 
3. In the new window, select 
4. Enter your Zotero username and password 
5. Click on Set Up Syncing. 
6. Make the selections in the syncing settings as desired under data syncing and file syncing.   
7. When finished, click on OK.

Uploading a Citation

To upload a citation into Zotero, you can use the Zotero Connector

1. Go to a webpage, book record in the catalog, or journal article in a database.  In the example here, we will be adding an article in a database
2.  You must be in the record for one article, you cannot add an article while in the results list.

Google Chrome

1. For Google Chrome browser,  in the upper right corner, look for the puzzle piece .  This is what you click on.
2. The Google extensions box will open, as is shown below:
3.  Click on Zotero Connector
4. The Zotero Connector will upload the citation to the article, and if the full-text is available, the full-text as well.

Microsoft Edge

1. For Microsoft Edge Browser, look for the or in the upper right corner.
2. Left click on the  or  or 
3. The citation will be saved to Zotero

Creating a Bibliography

Once you have your citations in Zotero, you can create a bibliography. You do that by

1. Selecting the citations that you wish to include in your Bibliography. You do that by holding the control key down and using the mouse go to the desired citation, then right clicking with the mouse.  The color on the selected will change to light blue.
2. Once you have selected all the citations that you want in your bibliography, then right click on any of the selected citations, and it will bring up a menu
3. Now click on Create Bibliography from items
4. Now you will need to select the citation style that you wish to save your citations in, as is shown below:
5. Now under output mode above, make sure that Bibliography is selected.
6. Under Output Method, select Copy to Clipboard.
7. Now you can open Microsoft Word.
8. In Microsoft Word, you can click on Paste , or you can press control-V.
9. The citations that you selected in Zotero, will load into Word. 

Creating a Collection (Folder) in Zotero

In Zotero, every time you add a citation on whatever topic, it is added to your list of citations in Zotero.  If you want to organize your citations by topic or assignment, then you can create a collection or folder.  To do that you need to do the following:

1. Go to the new collection image at the top left of the page  
2. Once you click on this image, you will see a small window in  the center of the page where you can add the name of the collection.
3. Once you have typed in the name of this collection, you click on OK, and the collection is created and added to the list of collections in the upper left corner of the page.

Adding a citation to a collection

To add a citation to a collection, you simply select the citation, and then, while holding down the left part of your mouse, drag the citation to where it is over the collection that you wish to add it to, and then release.