Zotero ‘is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research’, providing integration with word processors (including LibreOffice/OpenOffice Writer) and Web browsers.
From the Zotero Web site, download Zotero itself; the Zotero Connector for your Web browser; and a word-processor plugin. The last two may be installed more or less automatically as part of the installation of Zotero itself.
A change log is available.
(Before Zotero 5, there was an extension specifically for Firefox (Zotero for Firefox) but it stopped working as of Firefox 57 (ref).)
Zero-cost alternatives include Mendeley (proprietary, by Elsevier) and Docear, among many others. See this comparison of reference management software. As of 2015 Feb 16, those that are shown as being FLOSS, having OO/LO integration, and having stable releases within 2014 or 2015, include JabRef (a 'Java BibTeX manager') & Zotero. (The tables in the comparison are not necessarily up-to-date or accurate. On 2015 Feb 16, for Docear I changed Yes to No for integration with OO/LO and Kile/LyX, and updated the latest release for Zotero from 2014 Apr 30 to 2015 Feb 11, with intervening releases having happened in Jun, Sep, Oct, Dec & Jan.)
Zotero can pull bibliographic information from a wide variety of Web pages. See here for a list of currently recognized Web sites, and information about how to add new sites.
If Zotero recognizes something that it can capture from a Web
page, a capture icon appears in the Firefox address bar.
There are several different capture icons, indicating whether there is
a single item to be captured
(book 
,
article 
,
Web page 
,
image 
etc.) or
multiple items 
.
Click on the capture icon to capture the item(s).
Zotero plugins are available for a wide variety of software, including LibreOffice/OpenOffice. (As of 2013 Aug 18, Zotero does not support Apache OpenOffice 4 but this has changed in the development version (ref). At the moment Zotero supports AOO version 3 but recommends LibreOffice.)
Zotero supports syncing from one computer to another, and public and private groups. One can browse one's library on the Zotero server by logging in to the Zotero Web site and clicking on . Click on at the top, next to , to edit the user profile, check how much storage is being used, etc.
Both bibliographic information and actual documents can be stored on the Zotero server, but it costs money for more than a small collection of documents. phpZoteroWebDAV 2.0 by Christian Holz is a PHP script for storing a collection on one's own Web server (see also Mark Sample's discussion).
Zotero currently (2011 Apr 29) cannot pull items from an Ovid search-results page (discussion). An alternative is to select the desired items (or select all items) and export in RIS format, then import that into Zotero, which will create a new collection. (This was fixed as of 2012 Mar 17.)
It is (or was) recommended that you turn off recording of changes, at least when debugging, because it was ‘known to cause problems with Zotero integration’. This has improved somewhat but may still cause some problems. For one thing, when changes are being recorded and a citation is deleted, the corresponding item will still appear in the bibliography even after a Zotero refresh is done.
There is a buggy interaction between Zotero and some experimental features of LibreOffice 3.5 (ref).
To begin, or when things have stopped working properly:
Install Zotero word processor plugins on the
Zotero home page; then click on the link for the correct version,
e.g., Zotero 2.1 word processor plugins; then in the
Table of Contents click on the link for the correct word processor,
e.g., OpenOffice, LibreOffice & NeoOffice.
If things don't work, mix in some exits and restarts of Firefox, your word processor and/or your operating system. Sometimes ‘not working’ will mean nothing happens when you try to insert a citation, and sometimes it will mean nasty error messages.
An item in a Zotero library (‘My Library’) can be assigned to one or more collections. Dragging an item from one collection to another causes it to be copied; there is no one-step method of moving an item from one collection to another, you must copy and then delete the original item.
Collections can contain sub-collections. To make it appear as
though items in a sub-collection are also in the parent collection, go
to about:config in Firefox,
find extensions.zotero.recursiveCollections and set it
to true.
To see which collections an item is in, select the item in the middle pane and then hold down (don't just click quickly) the Alt key (Unix), Control key (MS Windows) or Option key (Mac). All collections that contain the selected item will be highlighted in the left pane.
The Zotero icon can be used for a number of neat things. For example:
Omit Author checkbox
(Suppress Author before version 6).
The citation will then include
just ‘(year)’ and you can specify the author's name yourself.
Zotero uses a specific paragraph style
(e.g., Bibligraphy 1)
for the bibliography. If you are using a document template that has
a pre-defined paragraph style for the bibliography (e.g.,
Reference), you can follow these steps in LibreOffice
to modify the style used by Zotero to match the one used in the template:
Reference).
Bibliograph 1 style the same
as that of the pre-defined style (e.g., Reference).
Unfortunately, it seems that this must be redone whenever the bibliography is refreshed because Zotero redefines its paragraph style.
Citation styles (defining what both the in-line citation and the reference-list entry look like) are defined in Zotero using CSL. Styles can be selected from the Zotero Style Repository.
A citation style can be adjusted by editing the .csl
file. See
instructions for editing styles, which discusses alternative
approaches, and also a tool for finding CSL citation styles by name or
by example and then using either a visual editor or a more
conventional editor with immediate feedback.
To install a style from a .csl file on your computer,
in Zotero do , click on the Plus sign,
browse to find the .csl file, select it,
and click on .
As of 2021 Aug 28, the
latest version of CSL is
1.0.1, released 2012 Sep 3
(ref).
This version is backward compatible (‘with minor exceptions’)
with version 1.0 (released 2010 Mar 22) but it
is not backward compatible with the
previous 0.8 format (released 2009 Mar 21).
A tool
is available for automatically
converting version 0.8 to version 1.0.
The tool involves using an XSLT processor;
I've done it (2018 Aug 16) using
xsltproc, with a command like
xsltproc -o name_1.0.csl csl_update.xsl name.csl
On-line validators for CSL can be found at validator.citationstyles.org and simonster.github.io. I had better luck with the former.
For my reference, and as examples of the many possibilities, the following sections describe the changes I made to an old APA style file (from 2011, CSL version 0.8) when creating my cihr.csl style file (since converted to CSL version 1.0 and further modified).
The APA citation style specifies the use of et al. for
six or more authors. To change it to three or more,
set the et-al-min attribute to 3 in the
<citation …> element.
When using a style like APA for which the authors' initials normally don't
appear in a citation, sometimes they will appear if Zotero feels that it's
necessary to disambiguate the names of authors with the same surname.
Sometimes this is because the same author's name appears in different forms
in the database, and sometimes it's because there really are two different
authors with the same surname but different given names. And sometimes
the disambiguation is really appropriate and sometimes Zotero may make
a mistake
(discussion).
Either way, if you want to avoid having the initials appear,
remove the attribute disambiguate-add-givenname="true"
if it is present.
Given two references, 'auth1, auth2, auth3 (1980)' and
'auth1, auth2, auth4 (1980)', when cited together they
will produce '(auth1 et al. 1980a, 1980b)' only if the attribute
disambiguate-add-names="true" is not present.
The Zotero APA style includes a DOI if given, even if the journal name, volume and pages are also given. Inclusion of the DOI can be suppressed by removing the lines
<if variable="DOI">
<text variable="DOI" prefix=…/>
</if>
choose and else elements.
To force the journal title to be given in its short (abbreviated) form,
add form="short" to the
<text variable="container-title"/> element.
The number of authors to include in a bibliography entry can be increased
by adjusting the attributes
et-al-min and et-al-use-first
in the <bibliography …> element.
Adding et-al-use-last="true" causes the last author’s
name to be included after an ellipsis character (…).
Line spacing in the bibliography is controlled by the attributes
line-spacing (within bibliographic entries) and
entry-spacing (between bibliographic entries).
If two or more references are cited together numerically, the IEEE style is ‘[1][2]’, and if one wants to add ‘e.g.’ in front it would have to be something like ‘(e.g., [1][2])’, which is ugly. Apparently IEEE is the only format that does this (ref.). The Springer Basic style, for example, gives ‘[e.g. , 1, 2]’, with the ‘e.g.’ inside the brackets but with an unwanted space. The Vancouver style gives ‘(e.g. ,1,2)’ with the same unwanted space and a missing wanted space.
See here for where Zotero stores things. By default, under MS Windows it's something like
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\random.default\zotero
and under *n*x it's something like
~/.mozilla/firefox/random.default/zotero
Zotero can import and export bibliographic data in a number of formats.
| Zotero GUI | Note | Abstract | Tag | Extra |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zotero RDF | bib:Memo | dcterms:abstract | dc:subject | dc:description |
| Bibtex | comment | abstract | keywords | note |
| RIS (Refman) | Nn | Nn | KW | n/a |
| Ref | KW | BS | ||
The following table illustrates some of the citation and bibliography styles included with Zotero 1.0.6. Some additional styles are available here.
For hyphenated given names, all of the styles here that use initials drop the hyphen and the following initial.
| Am Med Assoc | 1-3 |
1. Nicholson DT, Chalk C, Funnell WRJ, Daniel SJ. Can virtual reality improve anatomy education? A randomised controlled study of a computer-generated three-dimensional anatomical ear model. Medical Education. 2006;40(11):1081-7.
2. Ladak HM, Funnell WRJ, Decraemer WF, Dirckx JJJ. A geometrically nonlinear finite-element model of the cat eardrum. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 2006;119(5 Pt 1):2859-68. |
|---|---|---|
| Chicago A-D | A Y |
Ladak, Hanif M, W Robert J Funnell, Willem F Decraemer, and Joris J J Dirckx. 2006. A geometrically nonlinear finite-element model of the cat eardrum. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119, no. 5 Pt 1 (May): 2859-68. doi:16708944.
Nicholson, Daren T, Colin Chalk, W Robert J Funnell, and Sam J Daniel. 2006. Can virtual reality improve anatomy education? A randomised controlled study of a computer-generated three-dimensional anatomical ear model. Medical Education 40, no. 11 (November): 1081-7. doi:MED2611. |
| Harvard | A Y |
Ladak, H.M. et al., 2006. A geometrically nonlinear finite-element model of the cat eardrum. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119(5 Pt 1), 2859-68.
Nicholson, D.T. et al., 2006. Can virtual reality improve anatomy education? A randomised controlled study of a computer-generated three-dimensional anatomical ear model. Medical Education, 40(11), 1081-7. |
| IEEE | [1-3] |
[1] D.T. Nicholson et al., "Can virtual reality improve anatomy education? A randomised controlled study of a computer-generated three-dimensional anatomical ear model," Medical Education, vol. 40, Nov. 2006, pp. 1081-7.
[2] H.M. Ladak et al., "A geometrically nonlinear finite-element model of the cat eardrum," The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 119, May. 2006, pp. 2859-68. |
| NLM | (1-3) |
1. Nicholson DT, Chalk C, Funnell WRJ, Daniel SJ. Can virtual reality improve anatomy education? A randomised controlled study of a computer-generated three-dimensional anatomical ear model. Medical Education. 2006 Nov ;40(11):1081-7.
2. Ladak HM, Funnell WRJ, Decraemer WF, Dirckx JJJ. A geometrically nonlinear finite-element model of the cat eardrum. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 2006 May ;119(5 Pt 1):2859-68. |
| Nature | 1-3 |
1. Nicholson, D.T. et al. Can virtual reality improve anatomy education? A randomised controlled study of a computer-generated three-dimensional anatomical ear model. Medical Education 40, 1081-7(2006). 2. Ladak, H.M. et al. A geometrically nonlinear finite-element model of the cat eardrum. J. Acoust. Soc. Am 119, 2859-68(2006). |
The following is a manually indented example of one of the
ReferenceMarks that Zotero uses in LibreOffice,
followed by the actual citation:
<text:reference-mark-start
text:name="ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION
{ "citationID":"BbXvPpxi",
"properties":
{ "formattedCitation":"(Funnell and Laszlo 1978)",
"plainCitation":"(Funnell and Laszlo 1978)",
"noteIndex":0},
"citationItems":
[ { "id":64,
"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/5374211/items/9JHB5Q96"],
"itemData":
{ "id":64,
"type":"article-journal",
"container-title":"The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America",
"DOI":"10.1121/1.381892",
"ISSN":"0001-4966",
"issue":"5",
"language":"en",
"page":"1461-1467",
"source":"Crossref",
"title":"Modeling of the cat eardrum as a thin shell using the finite-element method",
"volume":"63",
"author":
[ {
"family":"Funnell",
"given":"W.R.J."},
{ "family":"Laszlo",
"given":"C.A."}
],
"issued":
{ "date-parts":[["1978",5]]
}
}
}
],
"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"
} RNDvgP4CONBV1"/>
<text:span text:style-name="Default_20_Paragraph_20_Font">
<text:span text:style-name="T55">(Funnell and Laszlo 1978)</text:span>
</text:span>
<text:reference-mark-end text:name="ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION
<!-- the same stuff again -->
} RNDvgP4CONBV1"/>
<text:span text:style-name="Default_20_Paragraph_20_Font">
<text:span text:style-name="T55">. </text:span>
If the Zotero database contained an abstract for the reference, that would be included here also.