Zotero is a free citation management tool (see more of these tools here) that, amongst other things, enables you to create a group library for your class or collaborative project. Zotero works on a browser as well as on a downloadable desktop application. It is also a great tool to use with WordPress, since it offers a plugin (Zotpress) that will transfer references from your library onto your publishing site. The Zotpress widget gives you the ability to cite your references from the text editor page itself. Integrating Zotpress in your site also allows you to create weekly reading lists if you attach the file or include the permalink for each item (e.g., PDF) on your reference library.
Importing Your Zotero Account into WordPress/Zotpress
You will need to activate the Zotpress plugin (Dashboard > Plugins > Zotpress: click “Activate”) to add citation capabilities to your WordPress site. Once activated, you will be able to select which accounts you would like to pull reference items from (this can be an individual or a group account).
- On your WordPress dashboard, go to Zotpress>Accounts:
Account” width=”328″ height=”252″> - Select “Add Account,” fill in the appropriate information following the instructions on the righthand side, and click “Validate.”
- Choose the default settings for your library, and finish by importing it in its entirety, or use the “selective import” option.
- Every time you add new items, you will need to reimport the library in order to access them from the Zotpress widget.
Re-importing the group library from Zotero:
When you add a new citation source to the Zotero library, that item will not be automatically added to the Zotpress plugin on your website. In order to do that, click on Zotpress on the menu bar to the left of the text editor window and select “Accounts.” Select “Browse” then “Selective Import” on the top of the page. Check the box next to the collection you’d like to refresh and click on “Import Selected.” You should now be able to find that source in the search engine within the Zotpress Reference widget.
Using Zotpress
In order to cite any work on a page or blog post, you will use Zotpress, which is the Zotero plugin for WordPress. In its current iteration, the Zotpress widget seems to only work properly for users whose roles are set to “editor” or “administrator” of the WordPress site.
For in-text citation and bibliography:
Note that, in its current iteration, Zotpress does not tailor in-text citations to the default format of your choice. You will need to customize the shortcode in order to conform to a specific citation style guide. Step 3 below guides you through this process, and you can find more detailed information towards the bottom of this post, under “Customizing the Format of Your Citations.”
- Find the Zotpress Reference widget to the right of the text editor window.
- Click the “In-text” tab and search for your reference (by author, title, year…) and click on the appropriate reference from the dropdown that will appear (Fig. 1). Enter the page number or page range of your citation.
- To conform to different style guides, you will need to customize the code by clicking on “Options,” and editing the “Format” box (Fig. 2). The placeholders “%a%,” “%d%,” and “%p%” respectively indicate author, date, and page number. If you omit any of those, the shortcode will refrain from generating its respective information from the reference in question. (For more on Zotpress codes see below).
- Click on “generate shortcode,” copy and paste the shortcode exactly where the citation should be in your text (Fig. 3).
- Copy the Bibliography shortcode that begins with “zotpressInTextBib” and paste it at the bottom of your post (Fig. 4). Note: the full reference for every in-text citation should appear in the bibliography.
A Little More on Coding for Zotpress
The Nitty-Gritty
Use the Zotpress in-text shortcode in your blog entry to create in-text citations. In-text shortcodes should look like this:
[zotpressIntext item="_______"]
The item is a code presented within braces {}, followed by the page number. This is what an in-text citation might look like in your text editor:
While we may see the media as "forms of pedagogy that teach us how to be men and women" [zotpressInText item="{QWUP2NX9,7}"]...The code within braces {QWUP2NX9,7} means that you are citing page 7 of the bibliography item QWUP2NX9.
Notice, from the pictures, that the item number “{QWUP2NX9,7}” was collected from the Zotpress widget once I selected the appropriate source. You can find the item number right below the box where you include the page numbers.
The above mentioned shortcode would look like this on the published page:
While we may see the media as "forms of pedagogy that teach us how to be men and women" (Kellner, 2011, 7)...
To display the auto-generated bibliography, include the in-text bibliography shortcode at the end of your post. If you were using MLA formatting style as default, this is what the shortcode would always look like:
[zotpressInTextBib style="modern-language-association" sort="ASC"]
… where “sort” refers to how the items should be sorted in the bibliography list (in this case, in ascending alphabetical order). This code will generate a bibliography list at the bottom of your page, including only the items that have been cited in the text.
Customizing the Format of Your Citations
Zotpress does not automatically style in-text citations to the default citation style you have chosen (that feature only applies to the bibliography). In can customize in-text citations to meet the requirements of your preferred citation style. For the sake of example, we will use MLA as a case-study.
MLA style guide recommends the omission of the publication date on the in-text citation, and also that the page number should not be preceded by a comma. We must take an extra step and edit the shortcode to customize it to MLA format.
Let’s go back to the shortcode from our in-text citation example:
[zotpressInText item="{QWUP2NX9,7}"]When you click on “Options” before generating the shortcode, you will see a box for Format that should read:
(%a%, %d%, %p%)
These placeholders indicate that, within the in-text citation, we will see the author’s name (%a%), the date (%d%), and the page number (%p). In order to omit either one of these features, you simply delete one of the placeholders (and the comma) and paste the updated shortcode generated by the plugin. Our shortcode would then look like this:[zotpressInText item="{QWUP2NX9,7}" format="(%a% %p%)"]The published page:
While we may see the media as "forms of pedagogy that teach us how to be men and women" (Kellner 7)...
Another MLA recommendation is that the author’s name should only appear in the in-text citation if it does not precede the citation elsewhere in the same sentence. In the example below we introduce the quotation with the author’s name. In this case, the author’s name would be redundant in the in-text citation.
According to Kellner, "the media are forms of pedagogy that teach us how to be men and women (7).
The shortcode was customized to omit the author’s name, just like we did while omitting the publication date. This is what the example above looks like on the text editor:
According to Kellner, "the media are forms of pedagogy that teach us how to be men and women [zotpressInText item="{QWUP2NX9,7}" format="(%p%)"].Doing it Faster
To summarize, you may choose to go about editing your in-text citations in two ways:
- Selecting “Options,” modifying the format (%a% %p%), generating the shortcode, copying and pasting it on the appropriate place;
- Or learning how to use the Zotpress code to conform to a specific style guide. Every shortcode appears within brackets and, in our case-study, will look like the following, in which the item number appears within braces {} followed by a comma and the page number or page range and the format appears within parentheses with tags indicated by the % sign.
[zotpressInText item="{ITEMCODE,pagenumber}" format="(%a% %p%)"]
