HIST

Using Zotero to Manage Your Citations

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Zotero is a free open-source citation management tool that helps collect, organize, cite and share research data. DMC has been supporting Zotero by offering workshops and consultations since 2006. In Spring 2020, Fondren Library has strengthened its support for Zotero by subscripting to Zotero storage as an institution. That means when you use Zotero and choose to synchronize your notes, attached files, and bibliographic records across devices, you don’t have to worry about running out of the limited free Zotero file syncing storage, or buying your own Zotero file syncing storage, or figuring out third party options. All Rice Zotero users now have unlimited file syncing storage. 

The Zotero workshop covers the basic workflow of using Zotero. It begins with installation of Zotero to ensure each student can use the application on his/her own computer. It then uses hands-on activities to show how to get book items and journal items into Zotero, how to organize stuff within Zotero, and how to cite with the help of Zotero. At the end, it briefly talks about Zotero’s sync and group features. The workshop can be customized to suit a class’s specific needs. In general, it takes about 45 minutes to 75 minutes. 

Upon faculty’s request, the Zotero workshop has been offered for many different courses over semesters. In a feedback email, a faculty wrote “My students turned in their bibliographies, and all of them used Zotero!” Another faculty commented “My graduate students love it. They wish they had known it earlier.”

Below are some of the courses that have had Zotero workshops. 

  • BIOC 112 Dr. Beth Beason-Abmayr
  • BIOC 587 Dr. Mary Purugganan
  • FWIS 147 Dr. Julie Fette
  • FWIS 152 Dr. Mary Purugganan
  • HIST 308 Dr. Michael Maas
  • HIST 575 Dr. Alida Metcalf
  • KINE 120 Dr. Amanda Perkins-Ball
  • LASR 251 Dr. Alida Metcalf
  • LING 499 Dr. Michel Achard
  • UNIV 600 Dr. Jennifer Wilson

HIST 238: The Body in Global Histories of Medicine

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HIST 238 introduces how people in different parts of the world have understood why we get sick and how we get better. As part of students’ exploration of different frameworks for dealing with disease and the body, they are asked to conduct original research and produce a podcast to effectively communicate their findings in an engaging way. To that end, the class made use of our in-class workshops to learn audio editing techniques with Audacity and Garageband, which they were then able to employ in our audio studio to record their final projects. Additionally, they made use of our digital lab’s scanning resources to scan tracings they made of various medical images from cultures around the world, which they then were able to print at large scale using the DMC’s high resolution inkjet plotter.

The class website with the completed projects can be viewed here.