Reference management

Do you spend hours fussing with footnotes or battling with bibliographies? Does the thought of resubmitting that article fill you with fear, because the house style is different? Are you spending valuable funds on research assistance to fix footnotes?

There is a better way: reference management systems can transform your research.

Introducing: Zotero

Zotero is my preferred reference management system. It is easy to use, integrates well with other software like Word, and can be adapted to your individual referencing needs. The best bit: it is free. It can be downloaded here.

For legal academics, there is an extension of Zotero called Juris-M. This offers additional functionality if you often cite case law or legislation.

Zotero offers a streamlined way to build a library of references and to add them to any piece of scholarship. It integrates with internet browsers, like Firefox, to allow you to add a reference to your library with one click. Your library can sync across devices, and you can save PDFs and webpages in your library for future access. There are impressively responsive forums, where you can post a problem, or seek changes to a particular referencing style.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of referencing styles that you can download and use with Zotero. For legal academics, you can access the AGLC, OSCOLA, and the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation. They are all available here. If you need to change the referencing style for your document – say, from AGLC to OSCOLA – that can be done pretty much instantly. Cross-references can update automatically. A bibliography can be inserted in seconds, and updated as you add new references.

Zotero can become problematic with very large documents. When I was finishing my PhD, for example, it took around an hour to update all my footnotes, and insert a bibliography. I then spent a few hours checking that all the references were accurate and that no errors had slipped into my thesis. By contrast, one of my peers estimated that they spent three months fixing their footnotes and creating a bibliography.

Zotero, then, is basically a process of investing some time and energy now in good reference management, to save months in the future. It has revolutionised the way I write and research – it really is the best form of Academic Kaizen.

Hints and tips

• Zotero has a quick-start guide here.
• If you need to make changes to a pre-existing Zotero style, there is a step by step guide here.
• I have added keyboard shortcuts to make my referencing faster: see the instructions here.
• If a large document (like a PhD!) becomes too slow using Zotero, think about splitting it into individual chapters, then consolidating before submission.
• Zotero can add references using a DOI or ISBN. See more about adding to your library here.
• I am obviously biased, but Zotero is not the only tool out there. See, for example, the comparison with Mendeley and EndNote here.
• There is an excellent Zotero plugin called Zotfile, which helps with the management of attachments in Zotero. The best thing? It can extract annotations from a mobile device (e.g. tablet, phone) and adds them to the Zotero record. An excellent tool for navigating your next literature review…
• If you end up with fields ALL IN CAPS, try right clicking on the text, and select “Transform text”. Magic.