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BIOL Comps

Editing Your Citations

To edit a record in Zotero, click on the record so that the citation information displays on the right side of the screen, then click within any of the fields (title, author, etc.) to edit them. Some common edits are listed below.

To make sure these edits display properly in your citations and bibliography, go to the Zotero toolbar in your Word document and click the "Refresh" button. Review your document to check that the citations and bibliography are now formatted correctly.

Edit Journal Abbreviations (Stem Cell Reports Style Only)

If you are using Cell citation style, look through your bibliography and make sure that all journal titles are abbreviated. (Note: one-word journal titles (Science, Nature, etc.) are never abbreviated).

  • Make certain all of your abbreviations have a period next to them. For example: Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA
  • If any abbreviations do NOT have periods displaying, add them manually by editing the journal title in the Journal Abbr field of the Zotero record.

Italicize the Genus/Species

To italicize text in a Zotero record (especially important for genus/species names in titles), type <i> immediately before the text you want italicized, and </i> after the text.

  • For example, here's what an article title would look like in Zotero:
    • Microplastic study reveals the presence of natural and synthetic fibres in the diet of King Penguins <i>(Aptenodytes patagonicus)</i> foraging from South Georgia
  • And here's what that same article title would look like in your Word document:
    • Microplastic study reveals the presence of natural and synthetic fibres in the diet of King Penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) foraging from South Georgia.

Edit article titles

Displaying titles in sentence case

Both Stem Cell Reports and The American Naturalist require article titles to be written in sentence case, meaning words are capitalized just like they would be in a sentence. If any titles need to be changed to sentence case, right click on the title in the Zotero record, then click “Sentence case.”

Capitalizing individual words in a title

In sentence case, some words (genus names, place names, molecular compounds like CO2) still need to be capitalized. If any of these words are displaying in lower case, manually capitalize them in the Title field of the Zotero record, then click the Refresh button in Word’s Zotero toolbar to update the citation.