This page provides an overview of how to organise your citations using Group Libraries, Collections, Subcollections and Tags.
Duplicate items can be identified in the "Duplicate Items" section of a library:
All items with multiple duplicate entries will be shown here.
To resolved duplicate items, click on a duplicated item and select "Merge" from the box to the right-hand side of Zotero. This will combine the two entries, merging data and notes, and is preferable to deleting a single item that could lead to loss of data.
Citations in Zotero are all part of a Library. Your own personal library is named My Library - unless you specify otherwise, this is where all your citations will be saved. You can also create Group Libraries, which allow multiple contributors to save citations in a single place, allowing for common resources when doing group projects.
To add a new Group Library, click the box icon in the top-left of Zotero:
And select "New Group" from the dropdown.
You will then be taken to the Zotero website, where you can choose a group name and decide who can access the group. For public closed and private groups, fellow contributors will have to apply for membership or be invited by you to join, respectively.
Collections and Subcollections are a useful way of organising your citations. Citations can be added to as multiple different collections and subcollections at the same time without having to save the citation separately each time. To add a collection, click on the folder icon to the left of the new library button:
Give the collection a meaningful name (such as a course, module, assessment or theme) and you are ready to go. To move the collection to other libraries, click and drag it to the new library. You can also click and drag the collection onto another collection, which will make the collection a subcollection, allowing more fine-tuned organisation as necessary.
The image below shows an example library, with collections for Assessments, Modules and General, and subcollections for Project 01 and Project 02 under Assessments:
To add a citation to a collection, right click on the citation and hover over the "Add to Collection" option and choose the collection you want to add it to:
If you need to further categorise your citations, you can add tags to items. Tags allow you to quickly locate citations sharing a common tag.
To add tags, select a citation and go to the "Tags" tab on the right-hand side of Zotero:
From here you can add tags. Note that when saving citations via the Connector, some will automatically import tags from keywords and subject headings provided. This can lead to inconsistencies with existing tags; if you want to disable automatic tagging, go to Edit -> Preferences -> General and untick the box "Automatically tag items with keywords and subject headings".
You can find a list of all tags in a library in the bottom left of Zotero:
You can colour-code tags by right-clicking on a tag and clicking "Assign Colour". This is useful for seeing at a glance which tags citations fall in to. In the example above, "to do" items are tagged in orange, items that have been read are tagged in green, and in-progress items are tagged in blue.
Clicking on a tag will display all items with that tag:
In the example above, the top image shows all items; the bottom image shows outstanding items once the "todo" tag has been selected.
