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Turku University Library

Reference Management

Group libraries in Zotero

It is possible to create groups in Zotero if you have created a Zotero account. Groups are useful for example when,

  •  In writing projects, a situation may arise where several people need to see common references.
  •  You are working on several projects at the same time, and you want to keep the sources of the projects separate.
  •  You want to share your reading list with a wider audience.

Group libraries always take up the storage space of the one who creates group, not the participants.

There are three types of groups in Zotero:

  1. Private
    1.  Not visible in Zotero Group Search
    2.  Only invited Zotero users can view and edit references in the group library.
    3.  This can also be used to maintain separate reference collections for your own projects alone.
  2. Public group for a limited set of users
    1. Visible in the group search in Zotero.
    2. Membership is only open to those invited or accepted on request
  3. Public group
    1. Will appear in the Zotero Group Search
    2. Anyone can join a group library..

For more detailed group-specific differences, see Zotero documentation.

  1. You can start creating a group either from the Groups button in the browser version of Zotero or from the Zotero program menus: File - New Library -New Group/ New Library
  2. On the Groups page, select Create new Groups
  3. After creating a group, you can adjust in Library Settings what each member type can do..
  4. If you created an individual or limited membership group, send an invitation to those who want to join the group library.

Group libraries always take up the storage space of the one who creates group, not the participants.

 

Your own groups are displayed in the left-hand side menu of Zotero, below your own folders.

  • each group library has its own folders
  • references from your own library and your group library do not communicate with each other; you can drag and drop references from one library to another, but any changes you make to the references afterwards will not change between Zotero libraries.
  • The group library has its own duplicate detection, which only checks duplicates within the group library.

If you have shared a group library with colleagues, you can edit the same document and add references to the group library. Different software versions can cause problems, so this is where backup is particularly important.

Colored tags

In Zotero, you can organise references into folders, but you can also assign tags to references. In each library, you can assign a colour to nine tags, which you can see immediately in your Zotero library.

 

 

Creating color tags

  1.   Add a tag to a reference by selecting Tags/Addresses from the right-hand side menu (third icon from the bottom, red tab).  If you want the tag to go to the top of the tag list, add a footer_

     After creating a tag, go to the Tag box at the bottom left of Zotero.
  3.  Right-click on the point of your choice and select Assign Color.
  4.  Select the colour you want and finally click on Set color.
  5.  If you want to move more than one reference to the same tag, select the references you want and drag the references onto the desired tag in the bottom left box of the Zotero.
  6. Now the colored references will look like this in Zotero: