This video will show you how to create an account with Zotero and fully install the Zotero desktop app for your device.
Before you start using Zotero, you'll need to create an account. To do this, head over to the Zotero homepage and click "Log in," and then click on "Register for a free account." You will then need to fill out your information on the registration page. Once you've done this, Zotero will send an email confirmation to complete the process. It's important to make sure, at this point, that you use your Sussex University email when you register, as this will give you unlimited storage through the university's subscription with Zotero.
Once you've gone through this process and you have received your email confirmation, then just head back to the homepage and log in. You can then just enter your details to log yourself in. After logging in, you will see your Zotero library inside your web browser. Your online account will mean you can access your library anywhere you go on any device. It also means you will be able to back up the citation information you add through your Zotero desktop app.
Next, we need to install the Zotero desktop app. So, if you make your way back to the Zotero homepage and then click on "Download." You’ll then be able to download the application from this page. Zotero is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but in this demo, we’re going to download it for Windows. So, if we then click "Download," and then if we click on the downloaded file that should start the installation process. Before we start the installation process it’s important to make sure that Word is closed on your device. And once you’ve done that we can now click on "Next" and if is the first time you’ve used Zotero, just go for the standard installation and then click “Next” and "Install." Now the installation is complete, you can hit ‘Finish’ and the Zotero app should now open automatically.
The next thing we need to do, once we have Zotero open, is to sign into our Zotero account on the desktop app. The easiest way to do this is to click on the grey sync icon in the top right-hand corner and then select "Open sync preferences." Then you just need to sign in using the details of the account that you just created. And then hit "Set up syncing." We can see that the desktop app is now synced to my online account. This means anything we add to our desktop app will be backed up in our online account. It will also mean we can access our library anywhere on any device.
So if we now press the grey sync icon again, we now have no red error icons, meaning we are now synced up to our online account. We can test this here by adding the information of a book. Here we have the "Cite Them Right: The Essential Referencing Guide” with all of its citation information, and then, when we look on our online library, we can see the “Cite Them Right” guide has appeared here too. So, we know that our accounts have successfully synced.
Next, we will want to install the Zotero Connector. This is going to be the best way to bring references and citation information into our library. To install the connector, head back to the Zotero homepage and, again, click "Download." This time, on the right-hand side, we are going to be given the option to download the Connector for whichever browser we’re using at the time. So, the Connector, as well as Chrome, also supports Firefox and Safari, but since we’re using Chrome we’re going to install the Chrome Connector this time round. So, if we hit the "Install Chrome Connector" button, and we’ll then just click "Add to Chrome" and "Add extension." If we now hit our extensions button we can see that the Zotero connector has successfully installed. To make sure the Zotero Connector is always visible, you will want to open up your extensions and check that the Zotero Connector is pinned to your toolbar.
We can now see the connector icon next to our search bar, and we’ll be using this connector to capture citation information from different sources that we see in our browser and add them to our Zotero library.
The last thing we need to do is to check that the Zotero Word plug-in has been installed. The plug-in should have been installed during the desktop app installation, but, if Word was open at the time, it may not have successfully installed. If this is the case, don't worry; we will look at how to manually add the plug-in at the end of this video. But first, let's check if the Zotero plug-in has successfully installed. So, if we head over to Word we can now see along the ribbon at the top, a new option has appeared: this is the Zotero plug-in. If we click on Zotero, we get a new set of options that relate to Zotero and this is how Zotero is going to communicate with your word processor. Zotero is also compatible with LibreOffice and Google Docs.
If the plug-in failed to install, then all you need to do is to close Word, go back to the Zotero desktop app, go to "Edit" and select "Settings." From here, select "Cite" and scroll down to the bottom where you will see the word processor options. All you need to do then is to click on the "Reinstall Microsoft Word Add-In" button, and that will reload the Word add-in to your word processor.
That’s all for this video, you should now have Zotero fully set up on your device, and you should be ready to start adding references to your library.