How to cite Zotero itself?

John_muccigrosso

Subject says it. Is there an official citation for the citation software?

adamsmith

You follow the rules of your citation style of choice, e.g. in APA something like

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. (2016) Zotero [Computer software]. Retrieved from www.zotero.org/download

APA wants you to cite the version number in text. In other styles you'd include it in the citation (which I'd consider better practice). If you're writing about the code rather than the tool, you could consider citing the github repository and possibly even relevant commits, but that doesn't seem relevant here.

Generally, I don't think it's customary or necessary to cite Zotero if you've used it as a reference manager any more than you'd cite Word. If you write about Zotero or if you use it to collect or analyze data, some version of the above.

John_muccigrosso

Thanks. I'm referencing Zotero in a talk and would like to have it show up in my bibliography for people to find, so this works.

mark

This probably should be on the about Zotero page. While citing software is easy, figuring out the (institutional) author is not trivial in the case of Zotero (e.g. the About page makes it seem like joint authorship between the Roy Rosenzweig Center and the Center for Digital Scholarship, but the citation above has only the former).

adamsmith

+1 -- doesn't cost anything to add that info and it comes up every so often.

mark

Bonus points if it can also be there in some form of embedded metadata that a translator can fetch. (See here for why this came up BTW.)

DWL-SDCA

See:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12698/cite-zotero-as-computer-program-with-zotero

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12773/bibliographic-reference-info-for-zotero-itself

John_muccigrosso

It doesn't seem like this info ever made it to the About page.