How to create book citations with Zotero and Google Scholar
When writing a scientific document, it is fundamental that you have good bibliography. And this doesn’t mean only reading good literature, this means you also need to have your bibliographic references properly written.
If you’re reading this article, then I assume you are already somewhat familiar with Zotero, a free and open-source citation management software. Your common usage of Zotero for capturing new documents is probably through the browser extension, as with just one click you can save all the information about the document you’re reading and use it later to create the respective reference in your work.
However, you can’t use the browser extensions always. I’m not talking about sometimes Zotero failing to capture all the metadata, I’m talking about books. Using the extension in a PDF is usually not a safe bet and using the extension on the book’s Amazon or Google Books page is not a good idea either.
In these situations, you can copy the citation from Google Scholar. Let’s say you want to capture bibliographic information for the book “Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques”. Then, you can look it up on Google Scholar to solve your problem.
In the query I enclosed the book’s title with double quotes to find exact matches, and added the last name of one of the authors to make sure the results found pertain to authors with that last name.
Now, if Google Scholar finds your book, you can use its built-in citation options to copy the book’s metadata:
In this case, the book was the third result recovered by the search engine. By clicking the cite button, a new menu pops-up with multiple citation styles:
You could simply copy one of those citation styles into your bibliography and call it a day. But, if you want to save it to Zotero, then you want to open the BibTeX format at the bottom (it will be opened in a new page).
Now, copy this citation (hit Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C in the keyboard to quickly copy all the text) and in the Zotero application use this option:
This will automatically create a new entry in your Zotero, just like when you use the browser extension!
And that’s it, now the book is ready to be entered as a citation in your work. The only caveat is the same as in any usage of Zotero: make sure you are not missing metadata for the citation. Both the browser extension and this method give an excellent kickstart for saving bibliography, but at the end we need to double check the metadata saved.
