Manual correction of Zotero items

Although Zotero can transport references automatically from numerous different types of web pages, these items should nonetheless be checked, because the structure of databases found on different web pages is not always standardised. Zotero might not recognise whether the records are of books, articles or web pages.

Although an item contains many descriptive fields, those for the author, title and year of publication must always be filled in.

• For books, also the field for the place of publication.
• For journals, also the title of the journal, the volume, issue, and pages that contain the article.
• For newspapers, also the publishing date of the issue.

For digitally published sources, permanent identifiers (DOI, handle) should also be added. Compared to URLs, permanent identifiers will always lead to the version of the source that was used.

It is always useful to take a look at the metadata in the right pane of  Zoteros and, if necessary, manually correct them. Most fields can be clicked and edited. Changes are automatically saved as they are made.

The Zotero manuals recommend keeping the titles of articles, books, etc. in Zotero in sentence case. If they are transferred to Zotero in the title case, you can change it by right-clicking on the title in the Zotero editing window. If the selected citation style requires references in the title case, Zotero can automatically correct this when formatting the bibliography. See https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/sentence_casing.

If the metadata cannot be downloaded with Zotero’s help, you have to fill in all the above fields manually. To do this, click on the New Item icon in Zotero, select the appropriate record type, and enter the required data in Zotero’s right pane.

To change an item, click on the word or number you want to change in Zotero’s right-hand Info window.

NB: If you access databases on the library homepage through the link Remote access with UT username and password, you will be directed to the database through a proxy server, from which the stored URL is unsuitable for citing, as it is not accessible to everyone. Therefore, when saving items in Zotero, prefer a VPN connection, or after adding an item, make sure that there is a DOI in the record information and delete the URL containing the word (ez)proxy from the record information.