ZOTERO

Always on the look-out for organisational tools, Nick Peers reveals how to bring all your research materials and notes into a single convenient space.

Credit: www.zotero.org

OUR EXPERT

Nick Peers says Zotero is the answer to his haphazard organisational systems.

GET TO GRIPS WITH ZOTERO

1 Navigation pane

Organise your reference materials into collections from here, and save advanced searches to create dynamically updated ‘smart’ collections.

2 Tag selector

All tags applied to the items in the middle pane are displayed here. Colour-code tags to give them more prominence.

3 Create new items

Use these buttons to create new items using templates, existing files or from ISBN numbers (and other codes).

4 List of items

Those items that meet your criteria from the navigation pane, tag selector and keyword search are displayed here.

5 Search tool

Perform quick keyword-based searches of a selected collection or your entire library here. Click the down arrow to change the search criteria.

6 Item pane

The currently selected item’s details are displayed here, split across four tabs. Info contains metadata for use in citations.

Zotero bills itself as your personal research assistant. It’s a free tool for not just collecting notes from a variety of sources, but also organising them, sharing them and even using them as citations and bibliographies within your documents.

Zotero exists as two primary components: a desktop client and a browser extension, known as a web connector. This component enables you to capture all or part of a web page and add it to your collection. More on how that works shortly.

By the time you read this, installing Zotero may be a simple affair using the Zotero-deb wrapper (see https:// github.com/retorquere/zotero-deb) for details, but at time of writing the author was in the process of transferring the package hosting to the Zotero organisation. In the meantime, head over to www.zotero. org/download/ to download and extract the tarball manually, then type the following commands, which assume you extracted the Zotero_linux-x86_64 directory from the tarball into your Home folder:

Once complete, you should find Zotero has added a shortcut to the Launcher for easy access. Launch Zotero and it’ll open your web browser to www.zotero.org/start/ where you’ll be invited to install Zotero Connector for Firefox or any Chromium-based browser with access to the Chrome Web Store. If you’re using a different browser, see the Quick Tip (opposite). You’ll also be prompted to create a free Zotero account – see the box (below right) for why this is a good idea and how to get your data backed up and in sync using it.

Research the tool

After closing your browser, you’ll see that Zotero has opened in the background. You’ll be prompted to install the Zotero LibreOffice Plugin, which makes it easy to link reference materials from Zotero to any LibreOffice document in the form of bibliographies and citations. If you skip this step now, you can install it later via Edit> Preferences>Cite (switch to the Word Processors tab). More on the plugin later.