Creating a personal bibliography with Zotero & adding ISBN, ISSN, Kindle, Epub & manual PDF references

Keeping track of all my books, literature and academic papers was a nightmare. I used folders and subfolders to hold them all; it was a mess; I spent far too much time trying to find papers or books, plus the time pulling together accurate citations.

Enter Zotero, a simple-to-use bibliography program that works so well on my Mac, linking to an app within Safari; more on this later. Zotero is a multi-platform – linking to a website allows easy access from any machine, which is excellent when working away from my home machine. 

Adding all my books – I have loads tucked away on shelves, cupboards, and bookcases dotted around the house – took some time, well over two weeks, but the effort was worth it. Zotero even allows me to locate the book in a specific place.

ISBN is a huge time saver here. Zotero has a magic button that allows you to enter the book's individual ISBN number, which will fetch all the relevant information, author, publisher, country, issue date and so on.

Zotero also has a simple but effective library folder system to allow collections of similar books to be collected together, and would you believe it allows books to be added to several folders if they need to be?

Writing papers is now so much easier when adding citations. Pages, my preferred writing platform on the Mac, allows footnotes to be added; dragging a Zotero book note into the footnote instantly enters a correct citation in my particular format Harvard.

My book collection was sorted. I then went on to add my books from Kindle; this is an easy affair, using Amazon and the Zotero app I mentioned earlier. Listing the book in a browser, the app takes all the relevant information and, like the magic button for ISBN, adds all the data Amazon has into Zotero. On the same subject, I have a small but growing list of Epub documents on Calibre. As yet, I see no easy way of adding them to Zotero other than a manual insertion of the data, with a location of Epub.

A point here on the use of books purchased in Kindle. I use a Kindle Basic black e-reader and mark interesting strings of text, adding notes and comments. Then I use the Kindle app on my Macbook Air to review the notes; this not only gives context to the highlighted note but also the page number, very useful in citing a reference.

Academic papers work in much the same way as Kindle and Amazon, highlighting the paper within the specific website. The Safari app imports most if not all the relevant information into Zotero. It's very much dependent on the website but mostly it works well. Interestingly, I use both Google Scholar and Connected Papers to search for academic papers, both of which work very well with the Zotero app. 

Next is my pile, and I mean a pile of trade and professional journals. It was here I encountered some resistance from Zotero; it did not understand ISSN. Now, most books will have an ISBN reference – enter this into Zotero and it will populate the record with all the data I need to cite correctly. But magazines are not listed in ISBN. They have their own referencing system, ISSN, which Zotero does not yet recognise. 

But Zotero will allow me to drag a PDF of the said journal and half populate the register, allowing me to fill in the remaining information for edition and so on. Not a huge problem but time-consuming, given the number of trade and professional magazines I need to list. A drop-down list brings up a specific content list for all sorts of publications and articles. An excellent article on the website expands on the differences between ISBN and ISSN. My collection of CIAT's AT Journal and AT Weekly has been added as PDF documents in this way.

But often I do not need the complete journal. Often, trade journals, and in particular, newspapers, have interesting articles, so I scan the article with Adobe scanners on my iPhone and send it to myself as a PDF via email. I import this first into Zotero as a PDF, adding manually the relevant title, and in the information panel with all the relevant source information, then into Obsidian as text and PDF. The text brings the ability to link the article to other research. 

Adding a list of publications to any paper or article is also handled very well by Zotero; see this video. 

Next is YouTube. Believe it or not, videos form a very useful resource and should be added to your Zotero bibliography. Again, the Safari app will link any video you are watching and add the required information into the information panel; it recognises that it's a video, so the info is specific to videos. Also, the better YouTube channels, like Matt Ferrell's Undecided, offer quite comprehensive Show notes, often via the main website as in Matt's case. These I often copy and paste into the notes tab on Zotero. 

One last program I use as part of my own personal bibliography is the use of Obsidian. If you have never used a programe like this, then try it. You will be amazed at the power of this program in linking words and titles and showing them in a linked cluster diagram; I used it to copy and paste Matt Ferrell's notes on solar panels and used this to expand my research. There is an add-in program that links Obsidian and Zotero together to allow you to write cited papers in Obsidian. This is not a plugin I use, preferring to use Pages. But if you want to see how words and concepts link, then this is worth falling up. 

Data takes many forms. For me, it is books, authors, papers, journals, and all of the other content I have collected in fifty years. Some of which I have forgotten or lost, some destroyed in computer moves. The Apple ecosystem allows me to bring all of this back into play and link it with the programs described above, and it's this linking of text as data I will explore in the next article.