Zotero hosts an informational video going over a variety of features that can help grab content online and bring it into your library:
This screencast covers six ways to get things into Zotero:
- Location Bar Icons: When you visit library websites, journal databases, and many other Zotero enabled sites you can click the icons that appear in the location bar to grab citation information.
- Create New Item from Current Page button: Clicking the Create New Item from Current Page button in the Zotero toolbar creates an item and saves the page as an attached snapshot.
- Retrieve Metadata for PDFs: Zotero can also attempt to identify PDFs you have saved to your computer. Just drag them into the middle pane and right click on them and select “Retrieve Metadata for PDF”. If Zotero can find the PDF in one of its linked databases, it creates a new library item for the paper, downloads the citation information, attaches the original PDF to the new item, and renames the original PDF based on the citation!
- Look up Items by Unique Identifier: If have a DOI, ISBN, or PubMed ID Zotero can look up its citation information.
- Manually Adding Items: Items can be added manually by clicking the New Item button in the Zotero toolbar, then selecting the appropriate item type. Metadata can then be added by hand in the right column.
- Importing Records from Other Tools: Many users come to Zotero with extensive collections stored in other reference management software. To import entire collections into Zotero, click on the gear icon and select “Import.” Browse to your file, select it, and click open.
