last modified: 2024-01-25

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Why is Zotero useful for a thesis? Saving you from a nightmare.

When you are finished writing your dissertation, a last touch consists in adding a list of the articles, books, etc. that you have cited in your dissertation.

This list of articles, books, etc. is called a bibliography and it should follow a series of rules:

  • it should include all the references that you have cited in your document.

  • the list should be sorted alphabetically by the name of the author of the reference.

  • each reference should include the title of the article (or book…​), the names of all authors, the name of the journal, the date of publication, etc.

Illustration: example of 3 references in a bibliography

Hamilton, W. L., Clark, K., Leskovec, J., & Jurafsky, D. (2016). Inducing Domain-Specific Sentiment Lexicons from Unlabeled Corpora. Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 595–605. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D16-1057

Hartmann, J., Huppertz, J., Schamp, C., & Heitmann, M. (2019). Comparing automated text classification methods. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 36(1), 20–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2018.09.009

Henry, E. (2008). Are investors influenced by how earnings press releases are written? The Journal of Business Communication (1973), 45(4), 363–407.

A very common and sad situation is to find students wasting hours and nights to finish up their bibliography, when actually Zotero helps you do it automatically.

Zotero helps you:

  1. keep and organize a list of your references

  2. insert these references in the text of the dissertation

  3. create automatically a bibliography at the end of the document, containing all the references cited in the text of the thesis.

How to use Zotero: 6 simple steps

1. Install Zotero on your computer

https://www.zotero.org/download/

2. Install a plugin to integrate Zotero to Word / google docs

https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_integration

3. Install a connector to integrate Zotero to your web browser

zotero connectors
Figure 1. with a connector, you can download a reference from the web to Zotero in one click

 

4. in your browser, find a reference and download it with the connector

zotero save reference
Figure 2. how to save a reference found on the web to Zotero

 

5. Insert a reference in your thesis

The first time you will insert a reference, you will be presented with a window asking you to choose parameters. Just click ok.

Then, a red search bar opens. Type the first words of the title of the article you want to insert, or the name of the author:

zotero add reference
Figure 3. how to add a reference found on the web to Zotero

 

6. Create a bibliography in your thesis

zotero create bibliography
Figure 4. how to insert a bibliography in your thesis

 

You need to insert the bibliography in your Word document just once. It gets automatically updated, no need to modify it yourself.

To go further

Find other methodology lessons here. round portrait mini 150

This course is designed by Clement Levallois, and check my free web app for data analysis.

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