Wikipedia Research Tools

Using Zotero

31 August 2015 Shyamal

Zotero is an free bibliographic software utilityIt adds to your browser as a plugin, you can also add the standalone software with plugins that allow you to insert citations into documents.

Let us say our task is to look for research reviews on a book.We now search for references to this book on Google Scholar

Zotero toolbar

Google Scholar shows up some scholarly reviews

It is paywalled, but let us make a note of the referenceLook for the export citation

Zotero supports several bibliographic formatsHere we choose EndNote

Zotero may prompt once for permission to be your reference managerAccept this and continue – you should see a little status message while the citation is imported

Click on Z to get the Zotero paneYou can add research notes and classify your bibliography – you can also keep links to downloaded PDF files. Search by keyword and tags.

You can keep notes on the referenceYou can also tag, create directories and organize your references as they grow.

Once you have completed your researchYou may want to export the citations to enhance our target Wikipedia article. Choose the references of interest (multi select by mouse clicking while holding Ctrl key) and then right click – choose the Export item

Choose Wikipedia Citation Template

Choose a file to save toWe have chosen just a single reference

Open the file in a text editor to find the citation Copy and paste between reference tags as needed – use the <ref name=“X” > … </ref> if you are citing it at multiple locations.

What if I wanted to research a good Wikipedia article?

Examine the scholarly references mentioned in a Wikipedia article

Zotero can extract all the references cited in an articleMagic done using COinS metadata hidden into the citation templates

Choose the references you want to import

The selected references are saved

Click Z to open up the Zotero paneIf the references are properly entered using Wikipedia citation templates. All the details of the references should show up in the details pane.