Streamline Your Research with This Free Tool

Organize your digital resources with Zotero, a free online reference manager.

Success Amid Chaos?

Years ago, I was graduate assistant to a professor who was editor of a respected journal. He had also published multiple books and contributed to anthologies and textbooks. In fact, I just now put his name in the library search bar and got 3,298 results. That’s works not only by him, but also about him and referencing his work. That’s a productive academic career.

This professor’s office was spectacularly messy. I would ask him for a document, and he would, with homing-beacon accuracy, retrieve it from one of the tottering piles on the desk or floor, pulling it from between his breakfast sandwich wrapper and a manuscript he was revising. It might have a little egg juice on it, but he knew exactly where it was.

As my former boss proves, people who function well in seemingly chaotic environments do exist. My theory is that these people just have very organized minds. They hold a key to where everything is, but that key isn’t obvious to outsiders.

Organization and Productivity

For most of us, though, organization is a necessary partner to productivity. The fifteen seconds it takes to label a file “Faculty Concerns Draft 6” can save the 5 minutes spent trying to figure out whether your latest draft is Untitled 2(5) or Untitled 3, and wondering why you saved it in your Job Seach file instead of your Thesis file. We have better things to do with our brain than sending it on such goose chases.

For most of us, organization is a necessary partner to productivity.

Of course, most of us are not really so lax as to leave all our important drafts unlabeled (though if you think it never happens, try teaching a First-Year Writing class). Nonetheless, improved organization can benefit everyone. True confessions — I managed my capstone references by keeping article PDFs in a folder on my desktop. I labeled articles things like “Haaranen Agents Qual” (which worked okay then, but now I could not tell you what that article contains, except that it likely uses qualitative methodology). I copy/pasted citations in APA from the database where I found an article and threw all the citations in a Google Doc. Notes went in another Google Doc.

This is not the worst possible way to keep track of materials. But really, there is no excuse for my not using a more streamlined system – other than that, at the time, no one had ever told me about Zotero.

I am out to ensure others don’t have that same excuse.

What Is Zotero?

In a previous post, I introduced readers to my friend Leslie, who is a librarian at Xavier University. When I asked Leslie for thoughts on how graduate students should be using the library, one of her first recommendations was Zotero. “It’s a tool for every stage of the research except the writing,” she said.

“It’s a tool for every stage of the research except the writing.”

Leslie, University Librarian

Zotero is a free, online citation manager. But as Leslie pointed out, it does much more than keep track of your references. It’s open-source software with web and desktop versions. The web version has a plugin that allows you to link and collect web pages, pdfs, journal articles, e-books, basically any digital resource. You can organize your resources in folders, attach notes and annotations, tag resources for easy search, and create a Works Cited list, Reference list, or Bibliography in multiple styles at, quite literally, the touch of a button.

Some Great Things About Zotero

1. Citations, of course

Once you add documents to Zotero, you can create a Bibliography, Reference list, or Works Cited page in zillions of styles, including ones you have probably never heard of. If you are writing for a particular publication (or professor), this feature will save you time and headaches. You do need to make sure to check Zotero’s work. As with all computer-generated citations, what comes out is only as good as the information that goes in. “For citations in general, don’t trust the computer,” Leslie said. With that caveat though, you at least have an alphabetical list of sources in an approximation of the correct format – all that’s left for you is the proofreading.

2. Take your sources with you

Zotero is not tied to a university or library. Your account is yours, so when you leave your program, your materials go with you. Zotero is also “platform agnostic,” Leslie said, so you don’t need a specific browser.

3. Notes, tags, and annotations

Zotero allows you to add notes to documents, tag resources for easy searching, store documents in folders, and create relationships between documents. You can even make annotated bibliographies in a couple of different styles (APA and AMA, for example).

4. Track your research trends

Looking over the articles, websites, and documents you have collected through the years can help you see how your research interests have changed and grown and remind you of trails you meant to go down.

Collaborative research

If you are working with multiple people, you can create a shared library. Additionally, there are Zotero groups, which are collaborative libraries on all kinds of topics. Leslie mentioned she recently joined one for ChatGPT. “If I’m tracking the trend of something, I join one of these things,” she said. For graduate students wanting to learn about a particular field or see research trends in their area of interest, a Zotero group can be a valuable place to start. Of course, it is important to evaluate the sources in the online libraries, because, as Leslie pointed out, “They are not necessarily vetted.” These libraries are an excellent starting point, however.

The best way to find out what Zotero does is to play around with it yourself. Here is a link to get you started. The software has good tutorials, and your library probably has a LibGuide with instructions for getting started and using the tool well. Leslie wrote the LibGuide on Zotero for Xavier, and you can check that out here.

Graduate Success Coaching

If you’d like help getting started with research or managing any of grad school’s many other challenges, I’d love to talk to you. Find out more or set up a free consultation using the buttons below.