This pages offers resources for students in undertaking economic research.
Citations and Bibliographies Using Zotero
Academic and technical writing requires references to establishing the context for a topic, place the research within its academic lineage, and create authority. Zotero is a powerful reference manager that allows researchers (and that includes students!) to organize digital objects on a personal cloud server. A digital object can be a recording or picture or text such as a .pdf or .docx file. In addition to creating an archive, Zotero supports the creation of inline citations and the creation of bibliographies in a range of formats..
Zotero replaces the common practice of downloading and storing articles and other images on one’s personal computer, with a system that links these objects to an external server. More advanced applications of Zotero support shared libraries to allow teams the share access to the same documents/objectives.
These seven vidoes present the basics of Zotero (version 6), implemented within a Windows system. Zotero works equally well with a Mac. (Click on the title to bring up the video.)
Zotero installs easily on a PC or Mac. You will need to use the Google Chrome browser for the best experience
Zotero appears similar to the Windows file structure, with two additional panes: One records the basic attributes of the document, and the second captures the metadata (information about data) that may be embedded in the document, or added manually by the researcher.
Students at the University of Manitoba should start their literature searches using the University of Manitoba library system.
Google Scholar (not Google!) is a common starting point for many researchers. Learning how to create filters to shape a search is an essential research skill that reduces time and targets the most relevant material. Note: many subject matter databases exist in Economics. Those researching health will want to use PubMed.
Most academic and technical articles (at least over the last decade) have embedded metadata that records the publication, author(s), dates, etc. Zotero uses this information to create bibliographies.
Older material or scanned documents, and interviews, videos and the like will require the researcher to enter this manually. Zotero also supports notes and tags which are powerful ways to review and synthesize material.
Inline citations are now the standard in most academic disciplines, law being a notable exception. Zotero assembles all the citations into a bibliography following the format of the researcher’s choosing.
