Zotero - English

Overleaf is an online LaTeX-editor which can be used to write assignments and manuscripts. By using a LaTeX-editor you can build the document structure yourself, which makes it easy to publish your document in several formats. It's also easy to work with formulas, tables and code snippets in LaTeX.

Overleaf is free to use, but the free version has some limitations compared to the full version. BI Norwegian Business School has no institutional license at the moment. Read and learn more about LaTeX.

Register Go to Overleaf to create a user account. Log in when the account is created. Getting started with Overleaf We do not have courses in Overleaf, but you can get started by looking at the Overleaf documentation pages.

You can connect Zotero to Overleaf to work with citations and reference lists. We will show you how this can be done using the free version of Overleaf (Zotero can be fully integrated if you're using the Premium version).

Make Citation Keys with Better BibTex

We recommend to install the add-in Better BibTex in Zotero (See installation instructions). This add-in can be used to make your own citation keys which are more stable than the ones auto-generated in Zotero.

In this example I have set the citation key to be auth.lower + year. The citation now consist of the first authors' surname in small letters followed by the publication year. You can chose your own citation keys and you can read more about his in the Better BibTex documentation.

1. Go to Edit -> Preferences.
   
   
    
2. Choose Better BibTex -> Open Better BibTex Preferences.
   
   
    
3. Choose Citation Keys -> Citation key formula and choose your format. I have used auth.lower + year in this example.
   
   
    
4. Go to a reference in your Zotero library and see that a new field with a citation key has been assigned. NB! References with the same first author and year will be marked with a, b, c etc. after auth.lower + year to separate them, for example zhao2020b.
   
   

Export from Zotero to .bib-format

You will need to make a .bib-file of your Zotero library to use it in the free version of Overleaf (you have to install Better BibTex to make this work, please see instructions above).

1. Choose the references (group, selection of references, etc.) that you want to export from Zotero.
2. Choose File -> Export Library.
   
   
    
3. Right-click and choose Export. Choose the format Better BibLaTex.
   
   
    
4. Choose a file name and save. Now you have a .bib-file which can be imported to Overleaf.
   
   

Now we're ready to work in Overleaf. The first thing you'll need to do is to start a new project. Then you import the .bib-file containing your references.

1. Choose New Project -> Blank Project, and give your project a name.
   
   
    
2. Click the Upload icon -> Choose Upload -> Select from your computer -> Choose the .bib-file you want to import.
   
   
   
    
3. The library with references is visible in your project together with the main.tex-file.Click on the .bib-file to see the metadata of your references. You can also see the citation key to every single reference.
   
   

You must import the package biblatex and link to your .bib-file to use the imported references in your Overleaf-document. Take a look at the documentation in Overleaf for more details.

Copy and paste the following code lines to the beginning of your document:

% Use biblatex for references - change style= as appropriate
\usepackage[style=apa]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{YourFileName.bib}

The line \usepackage imports the package biblatex. We can choose to use the APA style with the line style=apa. It's possible to use other styles, but APA is the recommended style to use at BI Norwegian Business School. 

The line \addbibresource links to the the .bib-file with your imported references (choose the name of your own .bib-file in the curly braces). 

Copy the following line to the end of your document to generate the references:

\printbibliography

This line is usually placed just before the line \end{document}.

Now everything is set up and you can start to insert citaitons in your document. You can format the citations in different ways; the most common formats are listed in the table below. The reference list will be updated every time you run Recompile.