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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 legal case

The Zotero Connector does not always detect that an online document is a case and therefore it may not grab all of the required citation information. If this happens, you will 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 'Case' from the drop-down menu. If you do not see 'Case' right away, click 'More', as shown below:

Screen shot of Zotero Library with Add Item icon highlighted.

The template for cases in Zotero is designed to accommodate one print law report citation. If a case has one or more print citations, then fill in the template with one of these citations (preferably the most official reporter citation), as shown below: 

Screen shot of item record in Zotero library.

The template for cases in Zotero lacks certain fields that are critical for Canadian legal citation. For example, there is no field for a neutral citation or an electronic citation. Nor are there any fields for parallel citations. 

Recommendation: Create a note attached to the item record for the case, and then add the neutral citation (if available) as well as any parallel citations to the note, as shown below:

Screenshot of a citation record in Zotero desktop library with Notes tab highlighted.Screenshot of a citation record in Zotero desktop library with Notes tab highlighted.Screenshot of a citation record in Zotero desktop library with Notes tab highlighted.