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Zotero

This guide explains how to use Zotero to store and organize your own collection of references and to automatically generate in-text citations and reference lists in various citation styles, including APA and MLA.

Save up to 25,000 references at a time from EBSCO databases

You can export up to 25,000 records at a time from EBSCO resources (OneSearch, Business Source Ultimate, Education Research Complete, ERIC, Professional Development Collection, Teacher Reference Center, etc.) into Zotero. To do that:

  1. On the search results page of an EBSCO resource, click on the Share link just above the results list, toward the right-hand side of the page.
  2. From the resulting pop-up window, click on the E-mail a link to download exported results (up to 25000) link at the bottom of the window. (The actual number that appears in the parentheses will be the number of results for your particular search, although this number includes duplicates. Duplicates will be removed when the file is exported.)
  3. Enter an e-mail address to have the link sent to. Select RIS Format as the format. (Important: This requires changing the default selection from XML Format.)
  4. After you've clicked on the Send button to have the link e-mailed, it will take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours for the message to be received.
  5. The e-mail message that you'll receive will contain a link that you can click on to download a ZIP file with the references. Click on the link in the message to download the file and then click on the resulting icon for the downloaded folder.
  6. In the pop-up window for the downloaded folder, click on the Extract all files link, choose a location to save the file to, and click on Extract.
  7. Log in to the Zotero desktop application.
  8. In ​Zotero, click on File and then on Import.
  9. In the resulting pop-up window, under "Where do you want to import from?", make sure that "A file (BibTeX, RIS, Zotero RDF, etc.)" is selected and then click on Next.
  10. In the resulting pop-up window, find the file that you'd saved and click on Open.
  11. In the resulting pop-up window, make sure that "Place imported collections and items into new collection" and "Copy files to the Zotero storage folder" are checked and then click on Next.
  12. Your references will then be imported into Zotero, which may also take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours; note that it may take several minutes before the status bar even begins to show any progress, depending on how many references you are importing.
  13. Once the import process has been completed, the references will appear in your Zotero library. Note that the number of references imported should reflect the total number of references with duplicates removed, which should be a smaller number than the number in parentheses from your EBSCO export link since that number included duplicates.