Manage References with Zotero

Install Zotero

In Firefox, choose Tools-> Add-ons... then choose the Tab 'get add-ons' and search for 'zotero', click on it, and choose to install it. After a restart of Firefox, you should be ready to go.

Setting up Zotero

In the lower right corner of your Firefox-Window there is should say 'zotero'. Click on it to open the Zotero sub-window. You can edit your settings by clicking on the cogwheel and choosing "Preferences..."

Suggestions:

• If exporting to a BibTeX file:
  
  • in the "Preferences..."-tab "Export", choose BibTeX and check the box "Display character encoding options on export"
  • when exporting, I use the 'Western (ISO 8859-15)' encoding->Zotero replaces 'ü' with '\"u', etc.
  • if LaTeX is set up to handle Unicode, you can use this encoding -> Zotero leaves 'ü' as 'ü', which LaTeX should understand
    
  • in your LaTeX file, make sure that you have "\usepackage{url}" in your preamble. Zotero elegantly replaces % and _ by \% and \_ in all fields but the 'url' field. If you load the package 'url' in LaTeX, LaTeX will treat 'url' fields so that '_' and '%' will appear as '_' and '%' in the output.
• Setting Zotero up to synchronize with an online account:
  
  • in the "Preferences..."-tab "Sync", enter username and password of your Zotero account. If you do not have one, click "Create Account"

  Your Library is now saved online and can be viewed and edited from any Computer that is online and uses your username/password settings

Using Zotero

If you found some published piece of writing using Firefox zotero is likely to recognize this as a potential library entry and will display a 'page' or 'book' symbol to the right of the current url. (This happens with most (if not all) online journals, amazon, scholar.google,...). Klick on that symbol and Zotero has filed your library entry before you can say "bapp".

Alternative use:
I like to save pdf files along with my citations. In order to achieve that with the minimum number of clicks, I usually open the pdf.
Zotero does not offer the 'page' symbol now, but if you have Zotero open, you can still use the "page with a green plus"-symbol to 'Create New Item From Current Page'. Now you just have a pdf lying in your library without publication data...
Now locate this pdf entry in your Zotero-Library-List and right click on it. Choose "Retrieve Metadata for PDF" from the context menu, and Zotero will retrieve that publication data from the PDF. WARNING: Obviously, if the PDF does not contain that Meta-Data, this approach is useless. I found that it works with (the originally published (avoid funky online viewers, or PDFs containing scans!)) PDFs from most peer reviewed journals, but seldom otherwise (CEPE working papers don't work :) ).

Other Zotero's advantages

With Zotero you can create as many folders as you like to organize your references, without making duplicating the pdf files. A single document can be in several folders (e.g. by topic, by author etc) at the same time. It's like itunes of documents.

In Zotero, you can add notes or tags to each document. You can make a keyword search through these.

Zotero can be also used for other documents like pictures and videos. A document can have several files.