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How to Use ZotPress

   Published Date: March 8, 2019  2 Comments on How to Use ZotPress

We got introduced to Zotpress during class to help us create bibliographies on our wordpress webpage. Zotero is a powerful tool that can help us organize metadata and generate bibliographies, while Zotpress is Zotero’s WordPress extension that can free you from copying and pasting bibliographies: it connects with the users’ Zotero library (or a designated group library) and permits users to generate bibliography codes of items in their library.

I got really confused as I attempted to built bibliography through it and decided that there should be a more comprehensive tutorial with more images to illustrate how the process should be done.

Let’s get to it.

Installation

1. Go to the “Plugins” page of WordPress and click “Add New”
2. Click on the keyword box and search for “zotpress.” Then click on the “Install Now” button to install the plugin. Activate the plugin after installation.
3. Go back to the Plugins page, Zotpress would be at the bottom (because of alphabetical orders.) Click on “Explore” to link your account to it.

Linking Account

4. Click “Next” to Proceed.
5. The interface would look like this: It would ask if the account is “User” or “Group”. User means connecting the individual’s zotero library, while group means connecting a group’s zotero library. You can click on the link on the right to find where to find the API User ID. I will show images next of these places.
6. After logging into Zotero, you can click on “Settings” and “Feeds/API”. Your userID for use in API calls would be shown in the page. Copy it and paste it to the “API User ID” part if you are using your own zotero library. You can either create a new key or use a key created in the past. Here I will click create new private key to generate the private key.
7. Put in the description of the key and decide what kind of access do you want to provide. Remember to always check “Allow Library access” when creating a key for Zotpress.
8. A key would be created and you can copy and paste it in the “Add Account” interface!
9. The Default Options would be provided. You can choose the citation style you prefer and if you have more than one zotero account (or both user and group account) you can choose the default account.
10. Now that your library has been imported, feel free to check if the items on wordpress is in sync with what you have in your Zotero Library.

Generating Bibliographies

11. Create a new post or go to the post you want to create bibliographies. Click on the Document tab and scroll down to see “Zotpress Reference”
12. Search for the item that you have already added to the library and select it. You can add multiple items at once.
13. Click “Generate Shortcode” after selecting the the items you want to cite. The code format is pretty simple: the first part of bracket is the API key for account, and the part behind the colon is the item key generated in Zotpress. You can go into options to change details of the citation. You can also change the style of citation under the “style” code.
14. Paste the short code into WordPress! I will provide information on what to do if it the code was just pasted as a paragraph.
15. You can also generate in-text citations. The default order for In-text citation is (%a%, %d%, %p%): author, date, page. You can change it in the options tab. Copy both shortcodes and paste them in the post.

Code Troubleshooting

16. Click on the 3 dots on the top right of post page. Click “Code Editor” to enable code view.
17. Here we will see that the shortcode is embedded as a paragraph here and we need to changed it.
18. Codes that need to be changed.
19. Revised code that makes it shortcode instead of paragraph. You can alter the pages being displayed here too: the numbers behind the KXA…. Item keys are the page number. sort = “ASC” means sort through ascending alphabetical order.
Click “Preview” to see the result.
20. And this is the final result! the parentheses are the in-text citations and the bibliography generated for it is in alphabetical order.
the first part was (,n.d.,1) because there were no author and no date put in for Three Songs About Lenin.

If you have other questions regarding Zotpress or want to explore it in a more advanced way, feel free to check out some other tutorials!

How to use Zotero with Web Publishing by NYU

Check here if Zotpres have import/sync issues

Author: alanranzheng

2 thoughts on “How to Use ZotPress”

  1. Thank you for your post. I was confused by adding my account to ZotPress the another day as well. Your post is very helpful and it explains the process of creating a private key.
    I really appreciate that you included how to use it in shortcode and explained it well.

    Reply

  2. Your walkthrough is very nice and helped me set up Zotpress on the site for my final project. It definitely made that frustrating process easier.

    Reply

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