Zotero

The ability to easily download new references is one of the great advantages of Zotero... It often works well, but sometimes there can be missing or incorrect information. It is therefore essential to check the record each time you download a new reference, otherwise, you may end up with bad references in your bibliographies.

A few simple tips can help you to make this process easier and quicker.

• Is it the right item type? Is it really a book, or rather a report or a thesis? Is it just a "document", or rather a case law?
• How many fields are there in the author field? One for institutions, two for persons.
• Edition number: better just the number (2, 3, 4), the rest (rd, ème) will be added later by Zotero.

For example, in this title I would like the name of the review to appear in italics rather than between quotation marks: 

All I have to do is use tags before and after the text element you want to change, in this case <i> and </i>, like this:

And the reference will appear like this in a Word document:
Hanke, L. (Ed.), 1966. Readings in Latin American history: selected articles from the Hispanic American historical review. T.Y. Crowell, New York.
using the Elsevier-Harvard style, and like this:
Hanke, Lewis, ed. Readings in Latin American History: Selected Articles from the Hispanic American Historical Review. New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1966.
using the Chicago style, which puts the titles in italics...
Other tags that can be useful: <b> and </b> to put a part of the title in bold letters.
^and to put something as an exponent (for instance for XXI^st century)
<sc> and </sc> for small caps.

The Linter plugin allows you to make most of these changes (italics, bold, supscript or subscript) more easily by adding shortcuts and a pop-up toolbar.

Pascal Martinolli, bibliothèques Université de Montréal, CC-BY