Skip to main content

Zotero: Creating Bibliographies

This guide shows you what you need to know about using Zotero as a powerful citation management tool.

Creating Your Bibliography: Straight From Zotero

It's easy to create a bibliography from your Zotero library.

Select the references or collections you want to include. Hold the control key and click to select multiple items. Right-click one of the selected items and choose Create Bibliography. Choose the bibliographic style you want, and select the output format: Save as RTF or HTML, copy to clipboard or print. (The RTF file format is compatible with all word processors.)

Creating a bibliography

Or you can just drag and drop references from Zotero into your document! They'll turn into fully formatted citations. This works with any word processor including Google Docs. Change the default style under Preferences on the "gear" menu.

Drag and drop citations

Creating Your Bibliography: While You Write

Zotero offers word processing plugins for Word and OpenOffice. The plugin adds a Zotero toolbar to your word processor that allows you to add citations to your document while you write.

To add a citation, click the first button ("Insert Citation") on the toolbar. Select the reference you want to cite and click OK. Zotero will add the citation at your cursor.

At the end of your paper, click the third button ("Insert Bibliography"). Your bibliography will appear, and new citations will be added automatically. Change bibliographic styles with the last button on the toolbar ("Set Doc Prefs").Inserting citations

Adding Styles to Zotero

Zotero comes with only a few bibliographic styles, but many more are available to download.

To import a new style to Zotero:

  1. Open Zotero.  Click the gear button and choose Preferences.
  2. Click the Styles button.
  3. Click the link Get Additional Styles...
  4. Select the style you need and click the install link.
https://libraryguides.fullerton.edu/c.php?g=189843&p=1253833
libraryguides.fullerton.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-25
32400
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:26DOCGYYQUSYA57AD2AGIXBE5HODAO44
<urn:uuid:16023fd2-4cab-4cc3-bba4-cc904e91507f>
2020-09-27T08:02:02Z
54.85.246.96
text/html
sha1:PFGEN4UN3REMPBGHH2GOSIDH45EMNN6S
<urn:uuid:31d07efe-78a6-486b-9573-bf010e313142>
https://libraryguides.fullerton.edu/c.php?g=189843&p=1253833
response
<urn:uuid:f496e4a6-fde0-44e6-be8e-12c48736a4bf>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-40
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-150.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/