Zotero helps you collect, organise, annotate, cite and share research as part of academic reading and writing. You can save references from the web, organise them with collections and tags, annotate PDFs, generate citations and bibliographies in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs, and work with shared libraries, which makes Zotero useful in research skills teaching, thesis supervision and collaborative literature work. Zotero’s own documentation presents collecting, organising, annotating, citing and sharing as core parts of the workflow.
- Functions
- Group collaboration | Research & writing
- Access
- Standalone
- Difficulty of use
- Moderate
Examples of use in your education
Use Zotero when you want to teach students how to move from collecting literature to organising, reading and citing it in a more structured way.
You can apply this tool in your teaching in several concrete ways:
Library setup - Show students how to build a Zotero library for a paper, thesis or literature review and save their first relevant references from databases, catalogues or the web, so they start organising sources early instead of collecting them loosely in separate folders or browser tabs.
Research structure - Ask students to organise their library into collections that reflect themes, chapters or parts of their research question, and use that structure in supervision or class discussion to talk about where the reading is already strong and where important perspectives are still missing.
Reading support - Model how students can use Zotero while reading by highlighting PDFs and turning those annotations into notes, so they keep track not only of what a text says, but also of why it matters for their own argument or project.
Citation practice - Demonstrate how students can insert citations and generate bibliographies while writing, so they understand how reference management supports the drafting process without replacing critical judgement about source use, citation accuracy or academic integrity.
Tip 1
Model one complete example in class, from saving a source to placing it in a collection, annotating a PDF and inserting a citation into a draft, so students see Zotero as one connected research workflow rather than as a set of separate features.
Tip 2
Ask students to keep their Zotero library aligned with the structure of the assignment by using clear collection names, brief relevance notes and consistent organisation, so the library supports supervision and writing instead of becoming a storage archive.
How-to videos
How To Use Zotero (A Complete Beginner's Guide)
Zotero Quick Start
How to Use Zotero Reference Manager in Microsoft Word
Getting started
Support
In case of educational questions, please contact your learning innovator or web team from your faculty.
In case of technical difficulty, please consult the official Zotero Help Center first. Zotero’s support documentation also includes a dedicated getting help page.
