Fixing Errors in the Zotero Record

Zotero generally does a good job capturing information needed to cite the sources you save. However, it is not guaranteed to be perfect. You should proofread any Zotero-generated bibliographies for errors. 

You can make these edits within the Zotero program by clicking on the information you want to change, and then typing. Clicking anywhere else on your screen will end your editing; your changes are saved automatically.

 

Here are some common issues to look out for:

Web pages saved via the Zotero Connector:

When you save a webpage, glance at the Zotero entry created to make sure all the important details were saved.  (There's a lot of variation between different websites and where important details like the title, authors, and date appear on the page, if that information even exists at all.)

Entries created by dragging and dropping PDFs into Zotero: 

Zotero's process to identify the citation information of PDFs can sometimes miss important details, such as the volume or issue of the publication. Check these entries more carefully. 

Title capitalization issues:

Some citation styles (like APA) require article titles to be in "sentence case," that is, only capitalizing the first word in the title, or words that are always capitalized (like locations or names). Zotero typically does not make any changes to capitalization, so you may need to make these corrections. If you right-click over the text in the 'Title' field, you can toggle between sentence case and title case (though you should still proofread the result).