Zotero - Managing citation styles

This short tutorial from UAB Lister Hill Library will demonstrate how to manage citation styles using the Zotero style manager. Zotero comes with the most common bibliographic styles Zotero comes with the most common bibliographic styles, but there are many more available to download. Managing your styles is almost seamless while using the Zotero Firefox extension. Let’s take a look. To see the styles To see the styles in your library, click on the “Actions” gear icon, choose preferences and make sure it opens under “Cite.” Choose styles. To delete styles that you will never use, select one or more styles, and you can use the command, shift or control key for that, and the press the minus button. Confirm and you will have only the styles you are interested in using in your library. Choose “Get additional styles” to find a style that you need. For example, the author instructions for the journal “Neurosurgery” specify that authors using reference software other than EndNote should use the JAMA style. So we can look for JAMA and when you get there You can click on it and then click “Install.” JAMA is now in your Style Manager. Returning to the Style Repository, you can browse for styles. This is useful if there is no exact style for the journal that you need. Instead, you can look for a similar one. Choose medicine, and then to reduce the the number of styles to look at, choose “show only unique styles.” Now scroll down and you can hover to see what the style will look like. For example, see Analgesia and Anesthesia. I’ve hovered over the title, and if you are looking for a numeric style, with journal titles abbreviated and italicized, this one might work for you or be close enough for you to modify. This hidden “view Source” icon brings up the code so from here, you can download it to your computer and then open it in a text reader to modify. Last, lets see how to add a style that is not in the directory. Perhaps you or your colleague has modified a style. This document will have a .csl file extension. So the first thing you are going to do is navigate to the file. I’ve put it over here on my desktop. Then, drag it to your browser window. You are asked to confirm that you want to install it, so click on “Install.” Now, going back to my style manager, you can see that I have installed Surgical Neurology International into my Style Manager. For those of you using the Standalone version for another browser, (I use Chrome,) you will be able to do the same functions, but with a couple of more steps. You will start in your style manager, …again, “Preferences” under the Gear icon, Styles under Cite... The main difference is that you will open, save, and import everything using the +. To add styles from the Style Repository, you’ll need to do “View Source” and then right click, save as and change this to a CSL file. Now use the + icon, select your style, open, and install. You will use that same process to install files on your desktop that were made by others or yourself. and not in the Style Repository. If you want to learn more about modifying CSL files or have other questions about using Zotero, please see the links in the Lister Hill Library guide to using Zotero.