untitled Zotero: A free and open-source reference manager Correspondence to: Julie Courraud, Institut régional du Cancer de Montpellier (ICM) Val d’Aurelle, 208 rue des Apothicaires, 34298 Montpellier Cedex 5, France julie.courraud@icm.unicancer.fr Julie Courraud Clinical Research Department, Institut régional du Cancer de Montpellier (ICM), Val d’Aurelle, Montpellier, France Abstract Zotero is a free, open-source reference management program compatible with Linux®, Mac®, and Windows® operating systems. Libraries are backed up online allowing sharing between computers and even multiple users. Zotero makes it easy to keep your reference library organised and ‘clean’. Reference libraries are compatible with other refer- ence management programs, and difficulties can be quickly addressed via online forums. For these reasons, Zotero can be a valuable resource to medical writers. Keywords: Reference manager, Bibliography, Medical writing, Open source, Freeware You may remember the time when inserting refer- ences in a text was one of the most time-consuming and arbitrary tasks. With time and projects flying by, your bibliography may have become a jungle where finding a specific article began to resemble cave exploration. Fortunately, reference manage- ment programs have been developed to make writers’ lives easier.1 Several programs are available, including Mendeley® (acquired in 2013 by Elsevier), EndNote® (Thomson Reuters), and Biblioscape (CG Information). In contrast to previous articles com- paring several reference managers,2,3 this article focuses Zotero, a free and open-source program orig- inally developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Corporation for Digital Scholarship in the USA. What you can do with Zotero Collecting and organising references Zotero is useful at all stages of citing sources, from conducting bibliographic searches to writing docu- ments. When you read citations on a computer, tablet, or mobile device,4 Zotero automatically col- lects ‘metadata’ (details such as authors, title, and date) that are stored in your electronic library. Metadata can also be recovered from the PDFs of the published articles (at least dating from around 2000) or by using article identification numbers. Libraries can be organised in collections as you would organise file folders on your computer (Figure 1), and files, notes, or links, even full texts, can be associated with each reference. PDF files are automatically downloaded when available (open access articles, for instance) and Zotero can rename them according to first author, year, and title. Zotero includes a search bar that helps find refer- ences within your library. This search function even includes the text within PDF files. Zotero also has a ‘locate’ button that helps finding items online. Libraries from other reference managers may be imported in Zotero.5 Inserting citations into a document Zotero is compatible with Microsoft Word®, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, and NeoOffice. When writing a document, you may easily insert citations by clicking on Zotero buttons. Your reference list is also automatically created and you can switch cita- tion format as often as needed. A style repository containing more than 6700 styles is available online;6 if the style you need is not on the list, you may find a similar style using the ‘search by example’ tool.7 In-line citations and bibliographies may be personalised (e.g. remove author or add page numbers), and journal titles may be automati- cally abbreviated when needed. Some styles also include a translator that adapts terms in cited refer- ences (e.g. ‘available at’, ‘accessed’, etc.) to a specific language.8 Saving, synchronising, and sharing libraries Zotero works much like Google Docs® or Dropbox®. When you create a personal account on Zotero, you receive 300 MB of free online storage, although this can be increased for a small fee.9 Zotero syn- chronises your computer with your online account so that all of your references are backed up on Zotero servers. You can even synchronise several 46 © The European Medical Writers Association 2014 DOI: 10.1179/2047480614Z.000000000190 Medical Writing 2014 VOL. 23 NO. 1 mailto: