Zotero can be used to annotate and take notes from your research materials keeping them all together in one place.

Zotero has several note options

• Manually added notes
  • There are two types - ‘child notes’ that are connected to a specific item in your library and ‘standalone notes’ that are not connected to an item in your library
• Create notes from websites
• Extract annotations and comments from PDFs

Manually add notes

• Click on the ‘Add note' icon in the top toolbar in the middle (yellow piece of paper with a green plus icon) 
• If you have selected a specific item in your library, you can choose between ‘Add a Child Note’ to attach to a specific item or a ‘Standalone Note’ to give the note a separate listing in your library
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• A free text field will appear in the right hand column
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Create notes from websites

• Highlight the text you want to copy into a note. Right-click (ctrl-click on a Mac)
• Click on the Zotero option (Firefox - ‘Zotero Connector’ & Chrome - ‘Save to Zotero’)
• Click on ‘Create Zotero Item and Note from Selection’
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Extract annotations and comments from PDFs

Highlighted passages and annotations can be saved as a Zotero note, keeping all your notes in one place. They can be used with the Word/GoogleDoc plug in, enabling you to add the notes directly to your document.

To extract highlighted passages:

• Open up the PDF within Zotero which should open in a new tab (double click on the entry in your Zotero library)
• Click the highlight option (the first icon in the toolbar in the middle, which looks like a pen)
• Select the section you want
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• Return to the Zotero library tab
• Right click (ctrl-click on a Mac) and click on ‘Add Note from Annotations’
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• Your selected text will now be saved as an annotation and will include the citation needed to include this in your work
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