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BOT 323 - Flowering Plants of the World

Library guide to support searching and organizing of sources for BOT 323

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 - use this method to create an annotated bibliography.

The following box will describe 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.

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."

Screenshot of zotero bibliography options menu, MLA style selected

4. Paste your bibliography into a document (Microsoft Word or similar).

screenshot of bibliography in a text document

Add More Citation Styles (for example, CSE Author-Date 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.

Search the style repository