Laura Carter

I’ve been training to become a trainer with the Digital Rights Academy. As part of this, I prepared and delivered a one-off training session: an introduction to the reference management software Zotero.

Zotero is open source, free,* and made my life much easier when reading for and writing up my PhD (which ended up with 1,000+ citations…). But it can also be a bit intimidating for new researchers, especially for students in humanities subjects who might never have used any kind of research software in the past. So I designed this training to be as accessible as possible, and to start from the beginning: how to add information about your references (metadata), how to use Zotero’s plugins to add research papers directly from journal webpages, and how to use it in Word to generate citations.

The slides from the training are available here if you’d like to see the information that we covered. And if you’d like to see the DRA run this again, please do get in touch!

* If you use it a lot, you may end up wanting to pay for increased storage—I did—but the free version gives you enough storage to play around with and find out if you like using it. I recommend not upgrading until you need to.