Adding Items
to Zotero
This page
describes the various ways to add items (e.g., books, journal articles, web
pages, etc.) as items in Zotero. To learn more about adding files (such as PDFs
or images), please see the filespage.
Via your web
browser
The Zotero
Connector's save button is the most convenient and reliable way to add items
with high-quality bibliographic metadata to your Zotero library. As you browse
the web, the Zotero Connector will automatically find bibliographic information
on webpages you visit and allow you to add it to Zotero with a single click.
For example,
if you are reading a journal article online, the save button will change to the
icon of a journal article (circled in red):
On a library
catalog entry for a book, the save button will show a book icon:
Clicking the
save button will create an item in Zotero with the information it has
identified. On many sites, Zotero will also save any PDF accessible from the
page or an open-access PDF that can be found for the saved item.
Generic
Webpages
Some webpages
don't provide any information that Zotero can recognize. On these pages, the
save button will show a gray webpage icon. If you click the save button on
these pages, Zotero will import the page as a “Web Page” item with a title,
URL, and access date.
Firefox:
Safari:
PDFs
If you are
viewing a PDF file in your browser, the save button will show a PDF icon.
Clicking this button will import the PDF file alone into your library and then
automatically attempt to retrieve information about
it. While this will often produce good results, it is usually better to use the
save button described above from the publication's abstract page or catalog
entry.
Multiple
Results
On some
webpages that contain information about multiple items (e.g., a list of Google
Scholar search results), the save button will show a folder icon. Clicking this
folder icon will open a window where you can select the items that you want to
save to Zotero:
Saving to a
Specific Collection or Library
After you
click the save button, a popup will appear indicating which Zotero collection
the item is being saved to. If you want to save the item to a different
collection or library, you can change the selection there, as well as enter
tags to assign to the new item.
Data Quality
and Choosing a Translator
The quality
of the data Zotero imports is determined by the information supplied on the
webpage. Some websites provide very high-quality data using a standard way to
provide Zotero with data (via embedded metadata). Other websites provide only
limited metadata (e.g., only the title of a blog post) or no metadata at all.
For many sites, Zotero has website-specific “translators” to obtain the best
quality metadata. Zotero recognizes almost all library catalogs, most news
sites, research databases and scientific publishers. (For more information, see
our compatible
websites list.) By default, translator
updates are automatically installed, independent of Zotero updates. Metadata
for the same item may vary in quality across sites providing it. For example,
importing an item from the publisher website will generally yield much better
data than importing from Google Scholar.
Zotero will
generally choose the best translator available for each site automatically. You
can choose an alternative translator by right-clicking on the Zotero save
button (click-and-hold in Safari) and choosing one of the supplied options. If
a website isn't importing properly, please report it on the Zotero Forums and provide
the webpage URL.
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 (
) at the top of the center column of the Zotero pane, type or
paste in the identifier, and press Enter/Return. To enter multiple identifiers
at one time, type the first identifier, then press Shift+Enter/Return, then
type the remaining identifiers (one on each line). Once you've typed all the
identifiers, press Shift+Enter/Return to import all the items at once. You can
also paste a list of multiple identifiers (each on a separate line), then press
Shift+Enter/Return to finish.
Zotero uses
the following databases for looking up item metadata: Library of Congress and WorldCat for ISBNs, CrossRef for DOIs, and NCBI PubMed for PubMed IDs.
Adding PDFs
and Other Files
To add a PDF
or any other file from your computer, 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. Zotero will automatically attempt to retrieve bibliographic metadata for PDFs, though in some cases this may yield lower quality metadata
than importing using the Save to Zotero button from your browser. If Zotero
isn't able to retrieve high-quality metadata for a PDF, you can save the item
another way — using Save to Zotero or Add Item by Identifier — and drag the PDF
onto the new item (if a PDF wasn't already attached automatically).
You can also
add add files as attachments to existing Zotero items by right-clicking on the
Zotero item and choosing “Add Attachment” or clicking the paperclip icon in the
Zotero toolbar. You can also add independent file items by clicking the green
plus sign (
) in the Zotero toolbar and choosing “Store Copy of File…” or
“Link to File…”.
Saving
Webpages
With Zotero,
you can create an item from any webpage by clicking the save button in the
browser toolbar. If the page isn't recognized by a translator, you'll see
the gray webpage icon. If the page does have a recognized translator, you can
force Zotero to save a Web Page item instead by right-clicking (click-and-hold
in Safari) on the Zotero save button and choosing “Save to Zotero (Web Page
with/without Snapshot)”
Firefox:
Safari:
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 webpage will be saved to your
computer and added as a child item. You can also save a snapshot with this
setting disabled by right-clicking (click-and-hold in Safari) on the Zotero
save button and choosing the relvant option. To view the saved copy,
double-click the item or the snapshot in Zotero.
Double-clicking
a Web Page item without a snapshot in your library will take you to the
original webpage. Double-clicking a Web Page item with a snapshot will display
the snapshot instead. You can also visit the original webpage by clicking the
”URL:” label to the left of the URL field in Zotero's right-hand pane.
Importing
from Other Tools
You might
want to migrate to Zotero but already have an extensive library stored in other
reference management software (e.g., Endnote, Reference Manager, Citavi,
RefWorks, Mendeley, Papers). To import such libraries into Zotero, start by
exporting the bibliographic data from your other software program. Then, in
Zotero, choose the “Import…” option from the File menu. Browse to your exported
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 Mendeley to Zotero, see Importing Records From Mendeley.
For detailed
instructions on how to make the switch from Endnote to Zotero, see Importing Records From EndNote.
For detailed
instructions on how to make the switch from Citavi to Zotero, see Importing Records From Citavi.
Importing
from other tools follows similar steps, so long as they can export a
standardized format.
Zotero can
import among others the
following bibliographic file formats:
·
Zotero RDF
·
CSL JSON
·
MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema)
·
BibTeX
·
RIS
·
Refer/BibIX
·
Unqualified Dublin Core RDF
·
Endnote XML
·
XML ContextObject
·
Web of Science Tagged
·
MEDLINE/nbib
Note that
import/export is generally not recommended for transferring entire Zotero libraries between different computers or 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. See Transferring a Library for
detailed instructions.
Bibliographic
data stored directly in Word documents using Word's bibliography feature cannot
be directly imported by Zotero or other reference management tools. However, it
is possible to import Word bibliographies by first formatting them as BibTeX,
then using Zotero to import the BibTeX data. See Citations inserted using Microsoft Word's built-in citation
feature.
If you have
Word documents with embedded Zotero or Mendeley citations, you can extract
these and import them into your Zotero library using the Reference Extractor tool.
Large-Scale
Imports from Databases
If you are
importing a large of items from scholarly databases (e.g., if you are
conducting a systematic review), databases such as Google Scholar, ProQuest,
Web of Science, and others, may lock you out if you use the Zotero save button
too frequently or with too many items at once. In such cases, it is better to
export the items as a batch in one of the standardized formats listed above(e.g., BibTeX and RIS are
common choices) and import this file into Zotero. Web of Science and ProQuest
offer the ability to select multiple items from a search results list and
export as a batch to various formats. In Google Scholar, you need to first save
the items to your Google Scholar library (using the ☆ icon in the search
results), then select and export them from the Google Scholar “My Library”
page.
Manually
Adding Items
To manually
add an item to your Zotero library, click the green “New Item” (
) button at the top of the center pane, 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-hand pane.
Note: When you want to create an item for a webpage, it is usually
easiest to visit the page in your browser and then save it to Zotero (see Saving Webpages). Because of
this, the Web Page item type is not included in the “New Item” menu. However,
if you really want to create a webpage item by hand, you create an empty item
of another type and switch the item type to Web Page in the right-hand pane.
Editing Items
When you have
selected an item in the center pane, you can view and edit its bibliographic
information via the Info tab of the right-hand pane. 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”.
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. If a person has only one name (e.g., “Socrates”), enter
this as a Last Name in two field mode. You can switch the order of two field
author names by right-clicking on the name and choosing “Swap First/Last Names”
To quickly
enter additional creators, type Shift-Enter/Retun to move immediately to a new
creator field.
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). Because citation styles differ in their casing requirements,
and because automatic conversion from Sentence case to Title Case is much more
accurate than the other way around, we recommend that you always 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.
If you need
APA-style Sentence case, with the first letter after a colon also capitalized,
we still recommend storing the title in full sentence case (with that letter in
lowercase unless a proper noun), installing the Propahi plugin, and using
its Uppercase Subtitles feature.
Links
Clicking the
label of the URL (“URL:”) and DOI (“DOI:”) fields will open up the
(DOI-resolved) URL in your web browser.
Extra
The Extra
field can be used for storing custom item metadata or data that doesn't have a
dedicated field in Zotero. If you need to cite an item using a field not
supplied by Zotero, you can also store such data in Extra. See Citing Fields from Extra for more details on how to cite these fields. For example, to
add a DOI to a Book Section item, add this to the top of Extra: DOI:
10.1234/567890
Verify and
Edit Your Records
Zotero will
accurately import the metadata on a Web page, but the supplied metadata may not
be fully 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. For
author names to be properly disambiguated in author-date styles, the author's
name must be consistently and identically entered across all items they
contributed to.
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.
Zotero users
should be 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.
Note: Adapted from https://www.zotero.org/support/ .