By default, Zotero stores new citations in "My Library." You can create multiple folders, or "collections" to organize your research by topic, thesis chapter, or assignment.
A reference can be in more than one collection at a time. In other words, a book on the Civil War could be filed in your "Civil War" collection, your "Arkansas History" collection and your "19th Century America" collection without having to make three copies of the reference.
There are collections specifically to help identify duplicate items and "My Publications" for creating a list of your publications on your Zotero public profile page.
At the top left is a folder icon. Click this to create a new "collection."
Drag and drop citations to place them into collections.
Tags are automatically added from imported citations. Click on a tag to find all citations with that tag.
You can also add your own custom tags to items.
Some find the automatically-imported tags a bit overwhelming. There is a lack of consistency across databases. If automatic tags are not helpful, see our tips for excluding these from your library.
The Middle Pane lists items and their attachments and notes in the currently-highlighted collection or library.
Each item will have a format icon indicated book, article, thesis, or other kind of publication.
Click the down arrow to the left of each item to see attachments such as full text PDFs or notes.
The Right Pane, newly redesigned in Zotero 7, contains all the details about the item currently highlighted in the Middle Pane. Icons let you jump to sections with the abstract, attachments and notes, Libraries, Collections, and tags for that item. Here you can add note and correct or update the item metadata.
With recent updates to Zotero you can manage and add items to your library using a web browser (without downloading the Zotero desktop program). Add items from a web browser plugin, with a DOI, ISBN, or other standard number, or manually by creating a citation. The Zotero Web Library is ideal for lab or shared workstations where you may not want to take the time to set up local software.
Note that the Web Library is missing some functionality you will find in the client:
