Genealogy friends, if I told you a free product could capture source citation information instantly for most sources in online catalogs with one click of your mouse, would you believe me? Instant citations? It is bonafide, proven, and you can prove it to yourself this very day.
I am frequently lauding the wonders of Zotero, as applied now to genealogy. It is the cure for many a research woe. But, one feature, virtually instant citations, makes it a “magic bullet”—a must-have for your genealogy toolkit.
It started for me in graduate school, where Zotero’s magic bullet cured my night-terrors. The prospect of thousands of sources to cite in my dissertation loomed large and scary. I saw a post online where a fellow history scholar suggested the seemingly impossible. He said Zotero—a free product—would capture your citation information in one click.
Could it be so? I had looked past Zotero as a potential research-keeping software several times, because I didn’t trust anything free, and it looked rather plain. But this scholar’s claim made me look again, skeptically. Surely there was a catch. There wasn’t. It captures information with one click–for all practical purposes an instant citation.
The limits
OK, let’s be real. You have a photograph of your grandmother that exists nowhere else in the world. Zotero can’t psychically cite that for you, of course. It has to have be described online. And the degree to which you will get proper citation details depends on how well the “metadata” of the source has been input online.
You will be amazed at how many sources are documented so well that you have little work to do. If you want to cite a book that is listed on Amazon, one click does it. The same is true for things that appear in WorldCat—and that is HUGE. It will be able to capture citations from most local public library online catalogs. And for a blog like this, it can cite the webpage.
Are you ready to test it? Great! Here’s the quick and dirty setup, so you can see an instant citation capture before the day is over.
Quick setup
These instructions are for PCs on Windows with a Chrome browser, but you will see alternatives along the way if you use another configuration. Also, be aware that software is changing all the time, so the following steps might need slight modifications by the time you read this.
Step 1: Install Zotero from Zotero.org, accepting the defaults. Then, let it open Zotero when completed.
Step 2: Zotero will bring up a browser screen that says, “Success! You installed Zotero!” Then, click on Install to load the Zotero Connector. –h——en prompted, choose to Add to Chrome, and choose to Add Extension, when prompted. [However, if this screen does not appear or the Install button does not do anything, look at the welcome screen displayed in Zotero and you will see the option there.]
Step 3: Your Chrome browser will now display a new icon at the top-right edge of your toolbar on any website that has information Zotero can read as a citation. It will look something like this:
I say “something like this,” because the actual image that appears as the icon will change, depending on what Zotero believes it is seeing on the webpage. In the case above, it perceives a book and shows a book.
Now find a book and click
Let’s go to a book in Amazon, using the browser you just set up. By way of shameless promotion, you could try this book: Zotero for Genealogy, by me.
Now for the magic bullet, click the new Zotero icon, which should look like a little book in the top-right corner of your browser. It should give you a message that the information is being saved to Zotero.
Now go to your Zotero screen. The book’s citation has been added to “My Library,” in the left panel. Next, click on the book title in the center panel, and you’ll see that it pulled not only the citation data (which shows in the right panel), but the entire detailed abstract of the book. It also gives you a link back to the web page. [It can now reformulate the data into proper footnotes and bibliographic entries in many scholarly styles, but that’s a subject for another day.]
Zotero has to be open on your desktop for this browser connector to work, by the way. But you can now grab all sorts of things. Why don’t you grab this blog post now and see how Zotero extracts it?
Tip of the iceberg
This is the magic bullet—the reason to make this the hub of your research toolkit. But, there are so many more treasures to master, if you want to make the most of Zotero. Play around with it. Better yet, get Zotero for Genealogy, and take a systematic approach to mastering one of genealogy’s best-kept secrets. (And, yes, the book deals with how Zotero can work with Evidence Explained. )
Prove it today!
Join us at our new Zotero for Genealogy website and discussion forum.
More posts on Zotero
- Zotero for genealogy: getting your ducks in a row
- Goodbye research log — hello Zotero
- Research To-Do List in Zotero
