There are tons of ways to get, books, articles, web pages, and any other kind of item into Zotero. So many, in fact, that we thought we needed this to make this short screencast. You might just be surprised at how many ways there are to get information into Zotero. This screencast covers six ways to get things into Zotero.

1. Location Bar Icons: When you visit library websites, journal databases, and many other Zotero enabled sites you can click the icons that appear in the location bar to grab citation information.

2. Create New Item from Current Page button: Clicking the Create New Item from Current Page button in the Zotero toolbar creates an item and saves the page as an attached snapshot.

3. Retrieve Metadata for PDFs: Zotero can also attempt to identify PDFs you have saved to your computer. Just drag them into the middle pane and right click on them and select “Retrieve Metadata for PDF”. If Zotero can find the PDF in Google Scholar, it creates a new library item for the paper, downloads the citation information and attaches the original PDF to the new item.

4. Look up Items by Unique Identifier: If have a DOI, ISBN, or PubMed ID Zotero can look up it's citation information.

5. Manually Adding Items: Items can be added manually by clicking the New Item button in the Zotero toolbar, then selecting the appropriate item type. Metadata can then be added by hand in the right column.

6. Importing Records from Other Tools: Many users come to Zotero with extensive collections stored in other reference management software. To import entire collections into Zotero, click on the gear icon and select “Import.” Browse to your file, select it, and click open.