Zotero, one of the leading reference management software (RMS) programmes, allows you to record and organise your bibliographic references quickly and efficiently, whilst also storing the full text (where available) for later reading. Zotero can be installed on any computer and, thanks to synchronisation (via your personal online space), your citation library will always be up to date.

Thanks to the Connector (available for various browsers), with a simple click you can import the citation and full text into your chosen Zotero library from any website or publishing platform (e.g. Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, the University’s UniCASearch discovery tool, etc.). There are over 30 types of documents that can be added to Zotero, ranging from articles to books, chapters to reports, court rulings to films.

Using the integration plugin for Microsoft Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs, you can insert citations whilst writing and create a bibliography, all in your preferred citation style. There are over 10,000 styles available in open format, which ensures that the user community can make improvements and add any missing styles. Zotero is also compatible with BibTeX and LaTeX.

If you already have a collection of articles in PDF format, simply dragging and dropping the files into Zotero will allow you to import the metadata, with information being automatically extracted. Your library can be searched using various criteria (author, keyword, title, etc.), and you can also add personal tags to organise your content more effectively.

Zotero is open-source software supported by two major organisations involved in digitisation, free software and education (The Corporation for Digital Scholarship and The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media), which ensures its independence from content providers and/or publishers and guarantees continuous improvement.