Zotero: Collecting Citations

In your Zotero My Library, highlight the collection or sub-collection (folder) you want the citations and files saved to.

In a database or online site, click the Zotero capture icon in the browser. Most commonly it will be the article icon, the Web page icon, or the book icon. It might be a yellow folder icon for list views.

When you click the Zotero icon, you will see the citation(s) and available full text being saved in a box in the upper right-hand corner of the browser.

The citations will now appear in the middle panel of the Zotero screen in the highlighted folder.

Sensing works in most library-provided databases, including full-text capturing if the PDF is available directly from database you are searching. Non-library databases can work as well if they include the needed citation metadata, such as Amazon.com, among others. 

When working with a useful Web page you wish to cite, you can use the Zotero to capture it.

However, the citation capture may be incomplete or incorrect because there is no citation metadata marked up so that Zotero can "sense" it. After capturing the Web page, go into Zotero's third panel to correct it.

Below is Zotero's attempt to capture a Web page citation. Looking to the right, notice important fields that are empty. Review the Web site and try to find the information that Zotero couldn't identify and complete those fields by clicking on the empty areas to edit them. The most important fields to fill in are the ones needed for a correct citation. Author is important; Abstract is less important because it is not used in a citation. 

In this screen capture, the highlighted citation has an icon with a page and a camera (circled in red). This is the "snapshot" icon. Zotero, in trying to capture the citation, has also captured the full-text of the Web page as a PDF for you to keep. Double-click the snapshot icon to view the captured full text.