Getting Stuff Into Your Library Zotero Documentation

getting_stuff_into_your_library [Zotero Documentation]
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Adding Items to your Zotero Library

This page describes the various ways by which you can store bibliographic information (e.g. of books,
journal articles, and web pages) as items in Zotero. To learn more about storing files (such as PDFs or
images), and attaching files to items, see the files page.
Web Translators
This feature is available if you have Zotero for Firefox or have installed Zotero Connectors for Chrome,
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Safari, or Opera in addition to Zotero Standalone. See installation.

One of Zotero's most convenient features is its ability to find bibliographic information on the web pages
you visit. For example, when you are looking at the record for a book in an online library catalog,
Zotero will often show a book icon in the address bar of your browser (circled in red)
Safari Users: The icon is just to the left of the address bar, grouped with other Safari icons:
When you click this book icon, Zotero will save all of the bibliographic information about that book to
your library, in a newly created Book item. On some web pages that list information about multiple
items (e.g. a list of Google Scholar search results), Zotero will show a folder icon. Clicking this folder
icon will open a window in which you can select the items that you want to save to your library:
If you have selected a collection in the left-hand column of Zotero (that is, a collection is highlighted in
the left column rather than My Library), items are saved into that collection.
Whether or not Zotero can recognize bibliographic information on a web page depends on the web
page. Some websites use a standard way to provide Zotero with data (via embedded metadata). For
other sites, Zotero relies on website-specific translators. Zotero works with most library catalogs,
several popular websites such as Amazon.com and NYTimes.com, and many (gated) databases and
websites of scientific publishers. Just look for icons in the address bar of your browser (for more
information, see our compatible websites list). By default, translator updates are automatically installed,
independent of Zotero updates.
Add Item by Identifier

You can quickly add items to your library if
you already know their ISBN, Digital Object
Identifier (DOI), or PubMed ID. To add an
item via one of these identifiers, click the
Add Item by Identifier button (
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) at the
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top of the center column of the Zotero pane,

type or paste in the identifier and press Enter.
Zotero uses the following databases for looking up item metadata:Library of Congress and WorldCat
[http://www.worldcat.org/] for ISBNs, CrossRef [http://www.crossref.org/] for DOIs, and NCBI PubMed
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/] for PubMed IDs.
Saving Web Pages

With Zotero for Firefox, you can create an item from the current web page by either clicking the
Create New Item from Current Page button (
) above the center column of the Zotero pane, or by
right-clicking the page and selecting Create New Item from Current Page in the Zotero menu.
If Automatically take snapshots when creating items from web pages is enabled in the General tab of
the Zotero preferences, a copy (or snapshot) of the web page will be saved to your computer and added
as a child item. To view the saved copy, double-click the snapshot.
Holding down the Shift key while clicking the Create New Item from Current Page button will
temporarily toggle the snapshot setting, allowing you to create a web page item with no snapshot even
if the snapshot preference is enabled, and vice versa.
With Zotero Standalone, you can create an item with snapshot from the current web page by rightclicking the page background and selecting Save Zotero Snapshot from Current Page.
Double-clicking a Web Page item without a snapshot in your library will take you to the original web
page. Double-clicking a Web Page item with a snapshot will display the snapshot instead. You can also
visit the original web page by clicking the URL: label to the left of the URL field in Zotero's right pane.
Annotations
Snapshots can be annotated, but this feature is no longer maintained or supported, and annotations do
not sync to other computers.
Importing from other Tools

You might want to migrate to Zotero but already have an extensive library stored in other reference
management software. To import such libraries into Zotero, start by exporting the bibliographic data
from your other software program. Then, in Zotero, click the gear icon (
) and select Import.
Browse to your file, select it, and click the Open button. This should import the exported items into
your Zotero library in a date-stamped collection.
For detailed instructions on how to make the switch from Endnote to Zotero, see Importing Records
From EndNote.
Zotero can import the following bibliographic file formats:
Zotero RDF
MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema)
BibTeX
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RIS
Refer/BibIX
Unqualified Dublin Core RDF
Note that import/export is generally not recommended for transferring entire Zotero libraries between
different Zotero installations. Import/export usually does not give you an exact copy of your Zotero
library, and, if you use Zotero's word processor plugins, any links to Zotero items from existing word
processor documents will be lost after recreating a Zotero library via export/import. Instead, you can
use Zotero's sync features or manually copy the Zotero data directory.
Adding PDFs and other Files

To include a PDF or any other file from your computer in Zotero, simply drag it to Zotero - you can drag
to an existing item to attach the file or drag between items to store as an independent item.
To the same effect you can also use Store Copy of File under the green plus sign (independent item)
or the Attach Stored Copy of File under the paperclip item in the Zotero toolbar (attachment).
For PDFs that you have added as independent items, you can try to automatically download
bibliographic data from the internet by right-clicking them and selecting Retrieve Metadata for PDF
Manually Adding and Editing Items

Adding Items by Hand
To manually add an item to your Zotero library, click the green New Item (
) button at the top of
the center column, and select the desired item type from the drop-down menu (the top level of the
menu shows recently created item types; the complete list of item types, minus Web Page, can be
found under More). An empty item of the selected item type will now appear in the center column.
You can then manually enter the item's bibliographic information via the right column.
Note: When you want to create an item for a web page, it is usually easiest to visit the page in your
browser and then save it to Zotero (see Saving Web Pages). Because of this, Zotero developers
removed the Web Page item type from the New Item menu. However, you can still create an empty
Web Page item by creating an empty item of another type and switching the item type to Web Page via
the right-hand column of the Zotero pane.
Editing Items
When you have selected an item in the center column, you can view and edit its bibliographic
information via the Info tab of the right column. Most fields can be clicked and edited. Changes are
saved automatically as they are made. Some fields have special features, which are discussed below.
Names
Each item can have zero or more creators, of different types, such as authors, editors, etc. To change
the creator type, click the creator field label (e.g., Author:). A creator can be deleted by clicking the
minus button at the end of the creator field, and additional creator fields can be added by clicking the
plus button at the end of the last creator field. Creators can be reordered by clicking a creator field label
and selecting Move Up or Move Down.
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Each name field can be toggled between single and two field mode by clicking the Switch to single
field / Switch to two fields buttons at the end of the creator field. Single field mode should be used to
institutions (e.g., when the author is Company A), while two field mode (last name, first name) should
be used for personal names.
Journal Abbreviations
Journal articles are often cited with the abbreviated journal title. Zotero stores the journal title and
journal title abbreviation in separate fields (Publication and Journal Abbr, respectively). While some
citation styles require different abbreviations, most of the variation is in whether or not the abbreviation
contain periods (e.g., PLoS Biol or PLoS Biol.). Because removing periods is more accurate than
adding them, we recommend that you store title abbreviations in your Zotero library with periods.
Zotero can then reliably strip out the periods in rendered bibliographies when the chosen citation style
calls for it.
Titles
In English, titles are typically either Title Cased or Sentence cased (for the distinction, see
http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/03/title-case-and-sentence-case-capitalization-in-apa-style.html
[http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/03/title-case-and-sentence-case-capitalization-in-apa-style.html]
).
Because citation styles differ in their casing requirements, and because automatic conversion of
sentence case to title case is much more accurate than the other way around, we recommend that you
store titles in your Zotero library in sentence case. Zotero can then reliably convert titles to Title Case in
rendered bibliographies when the chosen citation style calls for it.
To help with changing the case of titles, the title fields (e.g., Title, Publication, Series Title, Short
Title for the Journal Article item type) can be right-clicked. This shows the Transform Text menu,
with options to convert the title to either Title Case or Sentence case. Zotero does not recognize
proper nouns, and transformed titles should always be checked for capitalization errors.
Links
Clicking the label of the URL (URL:) and DOI (DOI:) fields will open up the (DOI-resolved) URL in
your web browser.
Verify and Edit Your Records

Zotero will accurately import the metadata but the metadata may not be accurate
Zotero will accurately import metadata supplied by most bibliographic databases, library catalogs,
publisher sites, and webpages. It will even make adjustments to the metadata to compensate for known
quirks (author names in all upper case, etc.) in what the supplier provides. That said, sometimes the
metadata that Zotero receives is incomplete or incorrect. For example, one major academic search site
often provides the wrong serial name with otherwise correct metadata. Another scholarly research site's
metadata can omit some of the authors' names or present them in the wrong order. Even major
publishers sometimes provide individual authors' first and last names in the wrong order and
inconstantly within the same journal volume and issue or even within the same article. Some publishers'
metadata may omit important items (author names when there are many, journal ISSNs, DOIs, etc.)
Some metadata is provided with only author last names and one or two initials when the authors' full
names are provided on the full text version of the article.* Publishers have different conventions for the
casing of titles. No software can accurately and reliably convert title case to sentence case. If titles are
entered in (or converted to) sentence case, Zotero can accurately convert them to title case if the style
requires that format. For Zotero to be able to properly disambiguate author names to fit the
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requirements of a style, the authors' names must be entered consistently and identically with each
record.
It is essential that users become aware of these issues and verify that the records in their library are
accurate and in the correct format so that Zotero can produce well-formed citations in the text and the
bibliography of your manuscript.
*For author names to be properly disambiguated in author-date styles, the author's name must be
consistent across all items to which s/he contributed.
getting_stuff_into_your_library.txt Last modified: 2014/04/08 15:10 by adamsmith
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the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Alfred P. Sloan
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Adding Items to your Zotero Library