Improve your research workflow by using Zotero as your reference manager
Categories: Reference Managers
Tags: references guides bibtex
The reference manager I would personally recommend to everyone is Zotero. It's free, open source, and highly customizable. In this post I'll give a basic overview on how to install and use zotero, including a PDF with a step-by-step guide, and links to add-ons you can install.
Zotero
A free & open source reference manager for all platforms with integrations for all modern browsers & text editors
Extremely customizable, lots of amazing plugins, can be completely tailored to your wishes
Powerful options like automatically grabbing/saving/renaming PDFs, fetching uniform metadata, and more
Installation is a breeze but the rest seems complicated...
I have just the thing for you: a playlist with playlist Zotero tutorial videos. These videos will walk you trough setting up Zotero, including changing a couple of settings & installing plugins, and covers all important functionality. They were recorded at the start of 2025 for Zotero 7.
If you're looking for a specific topic, you don't need to watch all the videos; I'd recommend to read through the detailed transcript of all the videos. Even for people who only want the video I still recommend opening the transcript, as it includes a list of 'keywords' and in which video they were covered to easily find specific topics, plus the transcript also contains a table with useful links, which is replicated here.
Zotero official
Official documentation: zotero.org/support
Register a Zotero account: zotero.org/user
Your Zotero Library online: zotero.org/mylibrary
Your Zotero Groups: zotero.org/groups
Use with Google Docs: zotero.org/support/google_docs
3rd party
Zotero Addon-Market Plugin: zotero-addons repo @ github
Better BibTeX manual: retorque.re
How to link Overleaf w/ Zotero: Link Zotero & Overleaf
How to dynamically cite in Overleaf w/ Zotero (just like in Word): Advanced Reference Search in Overleaf
Other links
For the previous version of Zotero (Zotero 6), I also still have some slides that walk through setting up Zotero including useful plugins. Note that this might be out of date.
The same goes for the list of Zotero plugins (a subview of the main information tool list that can be found here); this was made when Zotero 6 was the current version.
Looking for more tools to improve your research workflow? Check out the main list of information tools on this site for a lot more.