In this project you’ll be setting up a citation manager called Zotero and using it to begin collecting sources for your creative projects.

Why are we doing this project?

Throughout your college career and beyond, you’re going to be asked to keep track of where you got information from. Being able to show your sources is a matter of ethics. Here’s a few reasons you should care about proper citation:

• It is ethically appropriate for you to have sources for your claims. Making things up out of wholecloth might be ok on your personal podcast or blog, but it’s almost never appropriate in a professional setting. You need evidence–good evidence–to back up your claims. (That’s why we talked about reliability checks.)
• It is ethically appropriate for you to give credit where credit is due. You didn’t invent those sources (most likely); it would be unjust for you to claim the ideas of someone else as your own.
• Using proper citation form allows people (you and others) to follow up on your evidence. It is ethically appropriate for you to lay a clear and straightforward path by which someone can get to your sources.

You may have been asked in the past to do your bibliographic citations by hand, and if that’s the way you prefer to do it, Godspeed and you can go back to doing it that way after this class. But you can also let technology help you keep things straight, and even generate citations for you.

To do so, you should use a citation manager. For this class, we’re going to use one built here at GMU: Zotero. You’re also going to get to use your library skills from last week.

How to use a citation manager

• Install Zotero and sign up for an account. (Watch the video below, or these videos, for a better idea of how to install and use Zotero.) Make sure you also install the Zotero connector for your browser!)

• Join our shared class Zotero group (you got an email adding you—if you didn’t, tell me on Slack and I’ll re-add you).
• Using the Zotero Connector, add these sources that relate to your chosen topic to our shared class Zotero group. You’ll need to sync your account with your desktop Zotero app in Preferences in order to see the group library in your app-–then add a source to the group library by using the Zotero connector while the group library is open in Zotero.
  1. TWO books that you can see in their entirety, whether by a full-text version online, or a physical copy you can touch right now.
  2. TWO journal articles that you can see in their entirety. Make sure they come from a scholarly journal!
  3. ONE video or podcast. Zotero might not detect the metadata properly, so you’ll likely have to do some editing of the metadata.
  4. ONE website that is NOT an encyclopedia or History.com. Again, you may have to jigger with the metadata a little.
• Make sure the metadata is complete and accurate–-don’t trust the automatic filling to have gotten it correct!
• On your blog, write a post explaining why each of these sources should be considered reliable (according to the criteria for reliability that we discussed above, both in the podcast and in your own reflections on the John Green video), and also why it is a good source for you to use. Remember that the first source you find is not necessarily the best source! You should have a paragraph for each source.
• In your blog post, include a bibliography generated from Zotero (Chicago style, please!).
• Submit your blog post through our project submission form!