1.      Manage Your Articles with Zotero: Your first step to making your life easier is to get yourself set up with Zotero, which will allow you to manage the articles that you find, collect them into folders, export them into bibliographies. If you have not yet installed Zotero, please do so now. Note that it is a TWO STEP process to download Zotero. You must first download the app (1), and then download the browser extension for the browser you want to use (2). 

Screenshot of Zotero.org/download, indicating the two steps that must be taken to fully download Zotero.

2. Now go to Zotero.org and register for a free account.

Then go to the 'edit' menu in your Zotero app (NOTE- may appear in the 'Zotero' settings menu for Mac users), go into the Preferences menu, select the 'Sync' menu, and ensure that your username and password are filled in so that your library will automatically sync.  

3.  Finally, download the Word plug in so that you can work directly with Zotero while writing your literature review.  Go to Zotero, then "settings," then "cite," then download the Word plug-in.  You will need to restart Word for the Zotero feature to appear.

Click the link below to access the latest volumes of the journal Ecology, published by the Ecological Society of America. 

• Ecology (this takes you to the Primo record; then click on the link to Wiley Online Library eJournals. Then go to "browse," then "all issues.") 

1. Import Articles: Skim the Tables of Contents for recent issues of the journal Ecology and select an article which interests you, then follow the steps below:
   1. Import the article into your Zotero library by clicking the ‘import into Zotero’ icon. Pay attention to whether Zotero has accurately identified your item type as an article;
   2. Check for accuracy: did Zotero import the key pieces of metadata? Article Title; Journal Title; Author(s); Date of publication; Volume and Issue number; Page numbers.
   3. Find three more articles that look interesting to you and import them as well.  

3. Organize your sources: Once you have imported at least four articles into your Zotero library, create a folder called “Ecology Research Skills Practice” and add your articles to that folder.  Then create a second folder and name it whatever you'd like, and add some (but not all!) of the articles to that folder. 

4. Export your articles (you can skip this step if you are using the Zotero plug-in for Word; instead, go to STEP 7)

1. Add the citation style for the journal Ecology. Go to Zotero settings and select "Cite," then "Get Additional Styles."  Search for Ecology and click the style title to install it into Zotero.
2. Finally, create a bibliography from your Ecology Research Skills Practice collection; right click the collection, select "create bibliography from collection," then select "Ecology" as your citation style, and "copy to clipboard" as the output option.
3. Open a Google doc and paste in the bibliography.  ALWAYS PROOFREAD THE CITATIONS ZOTERO PRODUCES!  Zotero is only as good as the metadata it captures, and sometimes you'll need to fix some elements.  Two things to especially check for:  Adding italics and removing any all caps, and making sure author names are appropriately put into first and last names.

5. Follow the research: Select one of the articles which you have imported into your Zotero library and search for it in Google Scholar, then answer the following questions:

1. According to Google Scholar, how many times has it been cited OR how many related articles are there?

2. Select one of the authors and search for additional papers by that author.

3. Import several of those additional articles by that author into your Zotero Library

6.Track down the full text of the article: For one of the new articles by the original author which you have just pulled up in Google Scholar, track down the full text of the article: use the 'viewit@PugetSound' or open access option available through Google Scholar, or search the title of the journal in Primo and look at the ‘view it’ tab to see availability (use the facets on the left hand side to filter the results to only display journals if necessary). Then answer the following questions:

1. Was the article instantly accessible through Google Scholar?
2. Was there a ‘viewit@PugetSound’ link available for your article through Google Scholar? If so, were you able to successfully access the fulltext of the article through that link?

3. If you searched the title of the journal in Primo, what did you discover about access through Collins for that journal…is it available? In print or electronically? For what date ranges? 
4. If an article is not immediately available, make sure you know how to request it from interlibrary loan.

1. Now that you have imported several articles into your Zotero library, make sure that you can easily cite them from within a word document. Open a word document and select the ‘Ecology’ style as your style preference. (If you haven’t yet added Ecology as a new style, go to the Zotero Style Repository and do that now!)
2. Type a few sentences, then use the "insert citation" button from the Zotero Add-In toolbar to insert a citation for an item from your Zotero library.  Do this three more times so that you have at least 4 total citations for at least 3 different articles. Make sure you have at least one article cited twice, and make sure at least one of your citations includes two or more articles.
3. Then, make some space on your page and insert the bibliography.
4. Now, practice changing the citation style for your document using the ‘document preferences’ button.
5. Practice deleting some of the citations and refreshing your document to make sure the bibliography adjusts itself automatically.

See image below for the places to (1) to insert a citation for an item from your Zotero library (2). Then, make some space on your page and insert the bibliography (3). 

You can also drag PDFs directly into Zotero, and then try to locate metadata for them. First, you need to make sure that you have the PDF Indexing feature installed. Go to preferences, then the 'search' tab, then install the PDF Indexing tool.

With this feature, you can drag a file into Zotero and right-click to search for the metadata. This won't work with every PDF, but it's handy when it does work! It also allows you to save to Zotero directly from the PDF viewer of your browser. 

Try it with this PDF: 

So what do you do if you have a printed citation that you need to track down? For each of the articles below, how would you A) Import into your Zotero library? B) Access the abstract? C) Access the fulltext?

1. Carlberg, U. (1981). Defensive secretion of stick insects. Journal of chemical ecology, 7(5), 905-906.

2. Diederich, B., Schumm, M., & Cruse, H. (2002). Stick insects walking along inclined surfaces. Integrative and comparative biology, 42(1), 165-173.