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Referencing and plagiarism

Zotero

Introduction

Zotero is a free reference manager available to use online or to download to your desktop. It integrates seamlessly with MS Word to facilitate easy in-text citation and creation of reference lists from a wide range of citation styles. You can create your own personal library to store and manage references of journal articles, books, websites, videos and much more, in one place. Zotero allows you to share references with others via the Group Libraries function, and a browser extension called Zotero Connector is available to help capture references while browsing the web.

Access Zotero.

Getting started

To make best use of Zotero, please look at our Zotero workbook. It provides a step-by-step guide to help you navigate the key features for organising and citing your references effectively in MS Word. 

There are also some excellent guides and tutorials from Zotero to help you:

Selecting the correct citation style

Before you start citing and referencing, make sure to specify your preferred citation style. Zotero will automatically reformat in-text citations and references in your document to match the chosen style.

  • In MS Word, from the Zotero tab, click on Document preferences.
  • Choose a style from the list and click OK, or click Manage styles to search for another style.

Cranfield University has two recommended citation styles for Taught Courses: 

  1. For Author-date APA7 style select American Psychological Association 7th edition
  2. For Numbered NLM style select either 
    • National Library of Medicine for (round parentheses), or
    • National Library of Medicine (brackets, no "et al.") for [square parentheses] and which includes URLs/DOIs in the reference list entries. (For DOIs, paste the DOI information into the URL field to display it.)

Other citation styles are available and may be required if writing a thesis by paper (research students should check with their supervisor), or for publication (follow the journal publication guidelines for the recommended style).