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Legal Citation Management With Zotero

This guide describes how to use Zotero to import, manage, and create citations for Canadian legal information.

How to create a Zotero record for a statute

The Zotero Connector does not always detect that an online document is a statute and therefore it may not grab all of the required citation information. In these situations, you may have to manually create or edit the Zotero record yourself. 

To manually create a new record in your Zotero library, click the green New Item icon  and select 'Statute' from the drop-down menu. If you do not see 'Statute' right away, click 'More', as shown below:

Screen shot of Zotero library with Add Item selected.

The Zotero statute template is well-suited for American statute citations, but it is lacking certain fields that are critical for Canadian statute citation (e.g. statute volume, jurisdiction, chapter, etc.). 

Recommendation: Put the entire statute citation including the statute volume, jurisdiction, year, and chapter number in the 'Code' field as shown below.

Screen shot of item record in Zotero library with statute citation.