Overview
Zotero is a reference manager. You can use Zotero to store, organize, and cite references such as monographs, scholarly articles, webpages, case law, and statutes from your research.
Zotero is a service of the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, based in Vienna, Virginia, which supports free and open source software for academic research.
Install Zotero
First, download the Zotero desktop software to your computer.
Second, install the browser extension.
After installation of the browser extension, a Zotero icon should be in your web browser's toolbar (indicated in the images below by a red circle). Depending upon the web page you are on, the icon may look different.
If Zotero detects a book on the webpage, the icon looks like a book:
For an article, the icon looks like a white page:
For multiple sources, the icon looks like a file folder:
For a webpage, the icon looks like a gray page. Zotero displays this icon when it does not detect a source (article/book/etc.) on the page:
Now, you can start adding sources to Zotero Collections. See the Add a Collection page in this guide for more instructions on how to name a new collection for your research project.
Or, visit the Zotero Quick Start Guide to learn in more detail about how to use tags and collections in Zotero to organize your references.
Subject Guide
Creative Commons License
Zotero for Legal References is based on a guide by Latia Ward and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.