Staying Organised: Overview & Collections

Zotero provides several ways in which you can organise and effectively manage the references you've collected in your library.

In this video, we will provide a brief introduction to the different organisation options within Zotero, and we will then move on to focus on the main way you will most likely be organising your Zotero items: Collections and Subcollections.

Overview

So if we take a look at these Zotero interface, you'll notice there are a number of folders or, as Zotero refers to them, collections preloaded by default in the left-hand panel. We have 'My Library', 'My Publications', 'Duplicate Items', 'Unfiled Items', and the 'Bin'.

The 'My Library' collection acts like a master collection, and even when you start to add items into different collections and sub collections later on, all of your items will always remain in your 'My Library' collection as well. So if you ever can't remember which collection you put a particular item in, you know you will always be able to find it in 'My Library'.

'My Publications' is another default collection that allows you to automatically create a bibliography of your own research, and share copies of your work on zotero.org.

'Duplicate Items' shows the items in your library that have been identified as potential duplicates. You can use this collection to review and merge any duplicate items. We will cover this in more detail in the Tags, Related Items & Duplicates video.

The 'Unfiled Items' collection is where you will find any items that are not currently in a collection or sub collection that you have set up yourself.

When you delete something from your library, it will go into the 'Bin' collection. By default, items will be kept in the bin for 30 days before they are permanently deleted. If you right click on the Bin, you will have the option to empty it manually.

If you wanted to restore an item from the bin back into your library, just right click on it and select 'Restore to Library'. You also have the option to change the number of days before items are permanently deleted from the bin. To do this, go to Edit at the top of the page and then Settings, then scroll down to the bottom of the General section and under Miscellaneous you will be able to change the number of days here.

Collections & Subcollections

Next we will look more closely at probably the main way you will manage your library: Collections and Subcollections.

Collections and Subcollections act like folders and subfolders and allow you to organise the items in your Zotero library.

There are two ways you can create new Collections in Zotero. If you go to the toolbar at the top and then click on the 'New Collection...' icon, this will allow you to create top level folders.

Let's go ahead and create an example collection for the purpose of this video.

You can also create new collections by right clicking on 'My Library', and then selecting 'New Collection...'. And we'll create a second collection using this method. In Zotero, you can also create Subcollections; you can also do this in two ways.

If you want to place an existing folder inside another folder, then you just need to drag and drop. This will turn the collection you dragged into a subcollection of the collection you dragged it to. And if you want to undo this, simply drag that subcollection back to 'My Library'.

The other way to create a subcollection is simply to right click on any existing collection and then selecting 'New Subcollection...'. And once you've given it a name, just click Create Collection.

These collections and subcollections can be really useful ways for you to start organising your Zotero library.

So now we have some collections, how do we start adding items to them?

To add any existing items in our library to a collection, find the items you'd like to add in 'My Library' and drag and drop them into the relevant collection. You can select multiple items by holding down Ctrl and selecting the relevant items, and dragging across in the same way. You will then find the items we have dragged stored in their new collection. But remember, they will still also be visible in 'My Library'.

To copy an item to a new collection and have it appear in both places, right click on an item and select 'Add to Collection'. This item should now appear in our Example Collection as well as in Example No.2.

It's also worth noting that when you have a collection or subcollection selected in your library, when you then add a new item to your library using the connector in your browser, it will automatically be added to this collection unless you use the dropdown to select a different collection manually. As we can see, the reference item for this book has gone straight into our collection, Example No.2.

There are two ways to delete or remove items from a collection. If you want to remove the item from a collection but keep it in your library, then you can simply select the item and press the Delete button. Or, you can right click on an item and select 'Remove Item from Collection...'. As we can see, this item was removed from my Example No.2 collection, but remains in 'My Library'.

If, however, you want to delete the item from your whole library, then you can select the item and then press Shift (⇧) and Delete on a Windows device or Command (⌘) and Delete on a Mac. When you confirm this action, the item will be moved straight to the 'Bin'. You can also right click on an item and select 'Move Item to Bin...'.

If you need to rename a collection, you can right click on it, and select 'Rename Collection'. When it comes to deleting a collection or subcollection, you can do this without deleting the items, but there is also an option to delete a collection and the items contained with it.

If you right click on a collection or subcollection, you'll be given the choice to 'Delete Collection' that will leave the items in your library or to 'Delete Collection and Items', and this will send everything to the 'Bin'.

It's useful to remember that Zotero's search bar is context specific. At the moment it's searching within the whole of 'My Library'. But if I were to click on this collection, then the search box will only now be searching within this particular folder.

A useful tip if you want to identify which collections or subcollections an item is in, if you select it and then hold down the Ctrl button, it will highlight the folders in yellow where the item can be found.

Alternatively, you can select an item and simply scroll to the bottom of its info panel to see which collections the selected item appears in.

That's everything for this video on how to use Collections and Subcollections to start organising your Zotero library.

Staying Organised: Tags, Related & Duplicates

As well as Collections and Subcollections, Zotero gives us a number of other tools to help us organise our libraries.

In this video, we will look at how we can tag our items, create relations between items, and tidy up any duplicate items we may have lurking in our library.

Using Tags

We will first look at tags and how we can use them effectively in our Zotero library.

So to add a tag to an item, we simply need to select an item in our library and then scroll to the bottom of its details panel on the right hand side until we see 'Tags'. We can then create a new tag by clicking the plus icon, typing in our tag and hitting Enter. We should now see that this tag has been added to this item.

Once you have created a tag, you will now be able to see it in the Tags section in the bottom left-hand side of your Zotero library.

These tags can be used as a kind of filter to see particular groups of items inside your library. For example, if we select the tag we have just added, we will now only see the items in this collection that have had this tag attached to them. To remove this filter, we simply have to click on the tag again.

It's good to remember that tags are context specific. So for example, if I click on a different collection, then you'll see that some of the tags disappear because they are not attached to any of the items in this particular collection.

If you want to filter your whole library using all of your tags, then you need to be in 'My Library'.

Bearing this in mind, tags can be used in a number of different ways to organise our library. We might decide to add thematic tags, allowing us to see all the items in a collection that contain a particular theme within the essay we are currently writing, or that use a particular theoretical approach.

For example, we may want to add the thematic tag 'feminist' to this book on Feminist Frontiers in Climate Justice. So let's click on the 'Tags' icon and add that tag to this item.

We can also assign colours to our most important tags. So if we right click on our new tag and select 'Assign Colour...', we will get a choice of nine colours. We'll choose green for this example. Coloured tags make it easy to quickly scan your library, as items that have been tagged will gain a coloured circle or circles before their title.

Coloured tags will always show at the top of the tags selector and are always visible, even if the tag is not assigned to the particular folder that you are looking in.

By using these thematic tags, we can now quickly see which items in a collection link to the different themes we are writing about. For example, we can see which items take a Marxist approach.

And we can also select multiple tags, allowing us to see the items that contain two or more of the themes we are working with. So let's add our new feminist tag. We now see the one item in our collection that contains both of these themes.

As well as using thematic tags, we may find it useful to use tags as reminders. For example, tagging items with 'check info' or 'read later' to remind us to come back to them later on. Or we might tag an item with 'essential', if we know we definitely want to use this item in our work. It will be up to you to work out what type of tag will be most useful for your work.

To remove a tag, you simply need to navigate to the Tag section of that item and click the minus icon next to the tag.

You can also bulk delete tags, so, for example, if we wanted to remove the 'read later' tag, we just need to right click and select 'Delete Tag...'. This would remove the tag completely from our library and from any item that have been tagged with it.

It's worth noting that, by default, Zotero automatically imports keywords from academic databases; these tags, like the ones seen here, are often not that useful and can quickly become overwhelming in our libraries.

If you're finding that's the case, there is the option to turn this function off: just go to Edit and Settings, and in 'General', if we scroll down to 'Miscellaneous', we just need to untick this box that says 'Automatically tag items with keywords and subject headings'.

From now on you can just use the tags you create yourself, and if you want to delete the automatic tags that are already there, just click on the filter icon and select 'Delete Automatic Tags in this Library'.

Related Items

The Related Items feature is another option you can use to help organise your items.

While this feature will probably get used a lot less than collections and tags, as these also tend to show relations between items they are grouped or tagged with, relating items can be really useful in certain situations.

So let's have a look at how to set some relations up. To see related items, if you click on an item and then scroll to the bottom of its details panel, you will see the 'Related' section. If we then click add, we can then link together different items or notes in our library.

So, for example, if we were looking at Paulo Freire's 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed in one of our essays, we may have a number of items that relate to this book in our Zotero library, as can be seen in this collection, and we may find it useful to relate these items to each other.

This item, for example, is an edited book containing several scholars who have engaged with the original 1968 book, and so to relate this item to the Freire original, we can click add in the related section. We can then find the original book and add a relation. We can see this has now been added in the right-hand panel.

Some other examples of things we may want to link in this collection are a retrospective review of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written 50 years after it was published; a note that I have created myself inside Zotero that contain my own thoughts on the book; and a follow up book by Freire where he revisits his earlier work and extends its analysis.

As well as relating these one by one, I could also select the original book from 1968 and select all the items I would like to relate to it. So let's now relate those three items by navigating to the Related section, selecting add, and then holding Ctrl while selecting the three items and hitting 'Select'. We can now see that this item has been related to all the other items that engage with it.

One advantage of doing this is as your library gets bigger, you will be able to very quickly go from one reference to another related reference in your library.

Some other ideas of how you may want to use this function are connecting together chapters from an edited book; you could connect a conference presentation, which then became an article; you could link together a series of articles from the same journal; or you could link an article and the responses to it.

Again, it will be up to you to work out how this function can work best for you.

Duplicate Items

Next, we will look at duplicate items and how we can remove them from our library.

To check for duplicates, simply go to the 'Duplicate Items' collection in your left-hand panel. Zotero uses the Title, DOI and ISBN to identify duplicates.

So we can see in my library we have two items that have been identified as duplicates. If we click on them, both duplicates will be highlighted together, and in the right hand panel we can view all the different versions of the item. And if we now look to the right-hand panel, we have the option to view both items next to each other.

Before we get rid of one of these items, we first need to decide which one is the master item. So in this example, the top item is the more complete record, as the bottom item is missing a number of bits of information like the DOI and the URL. If we return to the top item, we can use this icon to decide whether we want to make any changes and pull them over from the other item.

Once we are happy with the master record, we just need to merge the two items together. So, select the record we're happy with and hit 'Merge 2 items'.

You should always resolve duplicates by merging them rather than deleting one of the duplicates. Merging references retains all of the Collection, Tags and attachment information from the deleted item. Simply deleting the item will lose this data.

Merges are also automatically recognised by your word processor plugin, so it won't affect any of your citations in a Word document.

That's it for this video, hopefully you've now got some new ways to keep your Zotero library organised. For more guidance on using Zotero, see the rest of our Zotero guide.