Curating your Zotero Library

Once you have linked your public Zotero library to Research AMP, Research AMP will create a page for each citation in your library which will appear in the Citations section of your site. The Citations page offers space to provide a short description of your library, a link to the Zotero web client for your library, and some search and filtering options.

The individual citation pages appear on the Citations page in the order in which they have been added to the Zotero library. You’ll note that not all the possible information on the citation appears on the citation page: we decided that the title, abstract, author, publication, and year were sufficient. We elected not to reproduce the information architecture, search, and filtering functions already available on the Zotero web client, opting to steer visitors there rather than reinvent the wheel.

It is worth noting that the online group library is the repository of truth for all citation data. As such, all changes to data need to be made in the Zotero desktop client, and changes will appear on the Research AMP site.

Organizing your Zotero Library

We recommend two Zotero groups within your Research AMP library. One group will be private, members-only, and serve as the back-end staging ground for editing citations before they go live. This allows for thoughtful curation and editing before citations are publicly available.

The second group will allow public access, but restrict editing to members. This is the main, public collection that you will link to your Research AMP website’s Citation Library. Before citations are moved from the staging library to the public library, they should be edited to reflect your citation style and linked properly with a URL to where the work exists in an online journal or database. Move them by simply selecting them and dragging them to the public group. Once a citation is moved out of the private staging library into the public one, delete the citation from the staging library.

Within your public access Zotero group, we recommend setting sub-folders with the exact same name as each Research Topic, in order to ensure that the citations appear properly on the Research AMP site. Failing to do this will cause your citations to not appear on the website. As such, citations should be organized into their appropriate sub-folder and not live “loosely” in the broader Zotero group.

Styling Citations in Zotero

We try to be as comprehensive as possible with our citations while maintaining clarity for the average website user. As such, we recommend setting specific style guides for citations among your Research AMP team. We find that the best citation practices for us are generally as follows:

• Item Type

• Authors

• Volume & Issue for journal articles

• Date in a YEAR/MONTH/DAY format

• Full Abstract

• Publication

• URL

We also recommend removing any tags that auto-populate with the citation, as they can pollute any controlled vocabulary you have created for your site's tagging system.

It is possible to turn off the automatic import of tags and subject headings: navigate to the general settings panel in Zotero, and uncheck "Automatically tag items with keywords and subject headings." For existing libraries, click on the option arrow of the tag pane and select "Delete Automatic Tags in this LIbrary."