Collections and Tags
As you build up a database of citations, it may be useful to group and organize them in ways relevant to your research or interests. See Collections and Tags for information on how to make use of the powerful organization features of Zotero. Making good use of collections and tags will make it easier to locate relevant references long after the initial capture of the citation data. Tags allow you to impose your own taxonomy on your collections; e.g., citations could be tagged by course numbers or names, by the article or work in which they were found, by the relevant research goal (Masters thesis, journal article), etc.
Searching your Data
Zotero offers useful searching and sorting capabilities. If you have added your own tags, this further expands the ways you can find and build associations between works.
Using Citations in Works
Zotero provides integrations to add citations directly into word processing applications including Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Open Office. You can also save lists of citations to your clipboard directly in Zotero and paste them into any place you are editing text. See documentation on Creating Bibliographies.
Citations can be output in popular formats including APA, MLA, and CSE, and even supports the creation of custom formats. Please note that automated citation generation is imperfect, and the results should be checked manually before submitting as part of an assignment, article submission, or other work. If reference output appears flawed it may be due to incomplete or incorrect metadata, in which case you may be able to add the needed information to the item and then export again. The better your pefect the data in Zotero, the more reliable it will be when used in writing and citing, so it is worth spending a little time to fix the data in Zotero at the time of capturing citations.