Zotero — Reference Manager for Researchers

The best free reference manager for researchers. Collect, organise, and cite papers with one click. Integrates with Word, LibreOffice, LaTeX (BibTeX), Obsidian, and every major browser.

2026-01-02 2 MIN READ

Official Site https://www.zotero.org
Category Reference
Pricing Free
Rating ★★★★★ (5/5)

Why Zotero is the Researcher’s Default

Zotero is the reference manager I recommend without hesitation. It’s free, open-source, and has no meaningful competition for academic use cases.

The workflow that changed how I research:

  1. One-click capture from browser (journal page → saves paper, PDF, and metadata automatically)
  2. Better BibTeX plugin generates clean, stable citation keys (zeghlache2024arxiv)
  3. Obsidian Citations plugin pulls all your metadata into your note-taking app
  4. Word / LibreOffice integration for those who don’t use LaTeX

Essential Plugins

  • Better BibTeX — stable, customisable citation keys, auto-exports .bib files
  • ZotFile — renames and organises PDFs automatically
  • Obsidian Integration (Citations plugin) — pull paper metadata into Obsidian notes
  • ResearchRabbit — discover related papers from your Zotero library

Two Resources to Get Started

Article: Complete Setup Guide — walks through the Zotero + Better BibTeX + Obsidian pipeline from scratch. Takes about 30 minutes to set up and saves you hours every month.

Video: Markdown + Pandoc with Zotero citations — shows how to write full academic papers in Markdown where citations are [@zeghlache2024arxiv] — Pandoc resolves them into a properly formatted bibliography in any citation style.

LaTeX Integration

Better BibTeX can auto-export your entire Zotero library to a .bib file. Reference it in your LaTeX preamble with \bibliography{~/Zotero/my-library} and Zotero manages the database for you. Never manually edit a .bib file again.