Zotero Reference Management Guide

A research workflow refers to an ordered and consistent set of tasks, routines, and tools that will help you advance through the stages of the research process in an organized and efficient manner.  The goal of an efficient research workflow is to breakdown the stages of the research process into a series of easily repeatable series of steps that will make the process more manageable.  

While effective researchers tend to move through all of the above stages when conducting research, successful research workflows may vary widely depending on individual preference and need.  For example, some people might like printing out articles, taking notes on note cards, and organizing those notes in physical space to outline their essays before writing.  Others may prefer taking notes electronically, organizing them in a word processor, and outlining their essay in Microsoft Word.  What works for one person, may not work for another.  What matters is organization, routine, and, when possible, automation.

Gather + Evaluate

The Gather and Evaluate stages of the research process involve searching for sources, saving your sources, evaluating them for relevance, and organizing them in a way that facilities an efficient research workflow. 

With Zotero you can:

• Save citations for electronic and print sources you locate in the library’s catalog and databases and organize them via collections and tagging. 
• Save the full-text .pdf’s of electronic books and articles for note taking. 
• Store your sources and documents in Zotero's cloud server and access them from anywhere.
• Create workflows with Zotero's collection, subcollection, and tagging features.

Analyze 

The analyze stage of the research process involves reading your sources, evaluating them for relevance, synthesizing and responding to them via notes, and beginning the process of integrating their ideas into your own. 

With Zotero you can:

• Attach notes to your sources.
• Extract highlights and notes from full-text documents .

Write + Cite

The writing stage of the research process involves integrating ideas from your sources into your essay and citing them via in-text citations and bibliographies.

With Zotero you can:

• Automatically insert in-text citations into your essays.
• Automatically generate "References" and "Work Cited" pages with a click of a button.

The workflow below is just one example of how you can use Zotero to create a path through the research process.  

1. Save Sources to Zotero: As you search across the internet, the library's catalog, and library databases, save sources to Zotero's "unfiled" folder, or to your main project collection.  At this stage in the process, cast your net wide.  You do not need to use everything you save.  The goal is to get all potentially relevant sources into Zotero for later review.

2. Preliminary Evaluation: Perform a cursory reading of your sources.  Sort the ones that are relevant into subfolders by sub-topic, resource type, or section of your essay (e.g. literature review, methodology, analysis, or etc.).  The irrelevant ones can either be deleted or sorted into an "irrelevant" folder.  

3. Note-Taking (stage 1): Once your sources are sorted, begin the first stage of note-taking.  In this first stage, the goal is to pull the main ideas, key findings, and any useful pieces of information into Zotero's "Notes" tab.  You can do this by highlighting key passages and inserting notes that summarize main points in your own words.  The goal is to get all of the relevant information from a source in this first pass, so that you ideally never have to read the source again.

4. Note-Taking (stage 2): Once you have all the main ideas and key pieces of information of a source in note form, you can extract this information from the source's pdf using ZotFile.  You can then go through Zotero's note fields for each article and offer your own analysis and reactions for each source.  In this stage, you can begin the process of integrating the ideas of synthesizing and integrating the ideas from your sources with your own ideas.

5. Second Evaluation: Decide which sources you will need to use in your essay and tag them with "Cite."  If your essay has several chapters or sections, you can break this down further via tagging (e.g. Cite-Introduction, Cite-Methodology, Cite-Literature Review, or etc.).

6. Writing (stage 1): Outline your essay in a word processor, using Zotero to insert in-text citations for each of your sections.

7. Writing (stage 2): Begin drafting your essay, drawing from your second stage of note taking in Zotero's Note tabs.

8. Writing (stage 3): Revise as necessary.

9. Generate your "References" or "Works Cited" page.