Research Guides: HIST 150: Law and Society in Imperial China (Fall 2024): Zotero

Using Zotero

Zotero
Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research. Users can sign-up for an account with their @wm.edu email address in order to take advantage of the University's unlimited storage plan.

New to Zotero? To take advantage of W&M’s institutional access and unlimited storage simply create a Zotero account using your W&M email address. To do so, go to Zotero.org and select “Log In” and “Register for a New Account”. Once you’ve established your account online, be sure to setup file syncing in your Zotero desktop library.

Already have a Zotero account? You can still benefit! All you need to do is log into your Zotero cloud account and change your primary email address to your W&M email account. To do so, follow these steps:

Go to Zotero.org and log in with your current email address and password.
Go to “Settings” and “Manage Email Addresses”.
Add your W&M email address as a secondary email address and click save.
Set your W&M email address as the primary address for your account.

Once you’ve made these changes, make sure you go into your Zotero desktop library, open preferences, and update your email address and password under “Sync.”

Need help or have questions? Reach out to the W&M Libraries’ Research Department at sweref@wm.edu!

Important Note

Zotero is extremely helpful, however the citations it generates are only as good as the metadata from the original source. There may be typos, incorrect punctuation, or poor metadata, especially if the original citation is downloaded from a website or GoogleScholar instead of one of the library's subscription databases. Be sure to always doublecheck the accuracy of the citations yourself.

Additional Information

Printable Setup Guide
Zotero Quick Introduction (<2 minutes: how to generate a bibliography with Zotero)
Using Zotero for Academic Writing (a 7 minute video taking you through ALL the basics)
Recorded W&M Libraries Tutorial on Zotero (~30 min)
How do you organize the sources you find as you research? Random emails to yourself? Hand-written notes of titles you can never find again? What if we told you there was an easier way to both keep your sources found AND cite those sources later? This workshop will introduce you to Zotero from installation to creating citations in your Word documents.
Recorded W&M Libraries Advanced Tutorial on Zotero (~24 min)
If you've used Zotero in the past or if you've attended the Beginner Zotero session this summer, you are now ready for Advanced Zotero! This session will introduce you to group libraries, adding new citation styles to Zotero, and other features you can utilize to improve your usage of this citation manager.