Working with scientific literature with the help of bibliographic managers

Working with a bibliography is one of the key stages in preparing academic articles, reports, and other scholarly and periodical publications. Correctly formatting a reference list and footnotes according to the requirements of a particular publisher or standard (GOST, APA, MLA, Harvard, and others) can take hours — and with revisions, even days. Citation errors can complicate the peer-review process and create the impression of insufficient attention to academic formatting.

Modern bibliography management tools such as Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote significantly simplify this process. They allow you to automatically save, organize, and format sources, freeing researchers from routine operations and reducing the likelihood of errors. Using such programs makes it possible to focus on the substantive part of the research, saving time and intellectual resources.

Thanks to built-in support for instant citation in many international standards, including GOST, formatting a bibliography takes only seconds. Zotero also supports automatic synchronization, allowing you to work with your library across different devices. Additional features — such as integration with Microsoft Word and Google Docs, group libraries for collaborative work, and the ability to quickly export references in various formats — make Zotero an indispensable assistant for researchers, students, and instructors.

Another advantage of Zotero is that its interface allows the user to view and edit (highlight needed information and create notes) documents without using third-party applications.

Below is a step-by-step guide to setting up the application on a computer:

Go to the official Zotero website: https://www.zotero.org. On the main page, click Download and download the version that matches your operating system (Windows, macOS, or Linux). Open the downloaded file and follow the installation wizard instructions. After installation is complete, launch Zotero.

Install the plugin to quickly save sources from the internet. The Zotero download page also offers Zotero Connector — a browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Edge). The plugin is also available in the browsers' Extensions stores.

First, go to https://www.zotero.org nd click Log in → Register. Fill in the registration form and confirm your email. If you plan to combine Zotero with Google Docs later, you may need an additional Gmail account.

Open Zotero, go to Edit → Preferences → Sync, and enter your account details to automatically save your library to the cloud. In the free version, storing documents in Zotero cloud storage is limited to 300 MB. This is enough to upload several articles. If you add materials beyond the limit, they will be stored only on your device.

Go to Preferences → Cite, select the required style. If necessary, download additional styles from the Zotero Style Repository. This will most likely be needed if you want to use the Russian GOST citation style.

Zotero does not have a Russian GOST 2018 style — only 2008 and some other local citation options may be missing. This should be taken into account when preparing the final list and adjusting it to journal requirements, dissertation councils, and so on. You can try downloading the needed style from the internet. In that case, you will need to use the Add Style function yourself. This is the "+" button in the Cite section of the settings.

Zotero automatically integrates with Microsoft Word and LibreOffice. Check whether the Zotero plugin is installed in Word: Preferences → Cite → Reinstall Word Add-in. A Zotero tab will appear in Word, allowing you to insert citations and generate a bibliography.

Create folders and collections for convenient organization of your library. Learn hotkeys and useful features, such as adding PDF files and annotations.

After the Zotero plugin connects to Word, you will be able to automatically add citations (1), add (2) and update (3) the bibliography in your document.

The first time you click Add/Edit Citation in a given document, you will see a window for selecting a citation style. Later, this style will be applied to the entire document.

After selecting a citation style, you can type the title of the work / the author’s name in Zotero’s red search bar and choose the work you need to cite with the right mouse button. Then press Enter.

If you need to cite two or more works at once, in the red search bar you must select all authors in a row using the right mouse button, without returning via Enter to document editing mode. If you do that and then decide to add a second work, it will be added incorrectly — separately from the first citation — which academic publishers do not welcome.

Depending on the citation style you selected, in-text references to other authors' works will look different. Below is an example of citing two works at the same time in GOST 2018.

Although Zotero greatly simplifies source management and bibliography formatting, certain difficulties may arise:

To cite a work in the required language, you need to duplicate its metadata in the program and, unfortunately, enter it manually in the required language.

Many international standards require not only transliteration but also translation of the article or book title. Zotero does not support automatic duplication of fields in different languages.

If a work has no DOI, ISBN, or other internationally recognized identifiers — a fairly common situation when working with articles written before the mid-2010s — its information must also be entered manually.

Despite the presence of a GOST style in Zotero, its implementation may contain inaccuracies in the order of elements in a bibliographic record.

Not all Russian academic databases (e.g., eLIBRARY, CyberLeninka) interact correctly with Zotero. Automatically imported data may contain formatting errors, incorrect metadata, or missing DOIs.