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MB 385: Emerging Infectious Diseases and Epidemics

This is a course page designed to help OSU students in the MB 385 Emerging & Infectious Diseases class.

Two Ways to Create a Bibliography

There are several ways to create a bibliography in Zotero. The next box will describe an easy copy and paste method. There is a more sophisticated method based on creating in-text citations (like in an article) and then generating a bibliography based on those in-text citations.

For the BI/MB 385 assignment, you only need to use the first option - create a Standalone Bibliography.

Create a Standalone Bibliography

  1. You do not need to create a bibliography based on in-text citations.  Instead you can create a bibliography based on a particular collection or just a few references.  First, select the resources you want to include in your bibliography.  This is easiest if you create a collection and add everything you want to include to that collection.  If you want to include everything that is in your My Library, that will work as well.

Highlight the list (click on an item to highlight it, shift-click to highlight the whole list).

Screenshot of the zotero window with a list of resources highlighted

2. Right click on your selections (command-click on a mac) and you will get a list of options.  Choose Create Bibliography from Selected Items.

Screenshot of the zotero window with a list of selections highlighted and the right-click menu displayed

3. Choose the citation style you want and choose "copy to clipboard." For BI/MB 385, choose Emerging Infectious Diseases. If you haven't already loaded this style into Zotero, learn how to do that using the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Screenshot of the zotero bibliography options menu with MLA style selected.

4. Paste your bibliography into a document (Microsoft Word or similar). Note - the Emerging Infectous Diseases is a little weird. Instead of doing a control-V or basic paste, instead right-click to get the Paste menu, then choose Text-Only Paste. This will tell Word to format the numbers correctly.

A red arrow points to a small clipboard with a capital letter A, representing the Text-Only Paste option.

A sample bibliography.

Add the Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal Citation Style

Zotero comes pre-loaded with 16 citation styles, including APA, Chicago, Harvard, and MLA.  However, many people need to work with citation styles that are specific to a particular journal.  To access more citation styles in Zotero, Google  Zotero style repository (or click on this link).

This will open a website listing all of the styles Zotero currently has available.  Search for the style you want  – by directly searching for the name of a style you want; or by searching for the format the style is written in, for example, author-date format; or by disciplinary field. 

You can double check to see if this is the style you had in mind by hovering over the title to see examples of books, articles and more cited in this style. 

To install a style, click the link for the name of the style.  The style will now be added to your list of styles, both in the style manager window and in Word.