Using Zotero with LaTeX (and, naturally, BibTex)

If you don’t yet know, Zotero is a fantastic choice for reference management.  If you manage references you should use it.  It does everything at least as well as the competition and does one thing the competition does not–it clips not only citations, but also full text PDFs from all major databases.  Very handy.  Plus, it’s open source and free (unless you want to upgrade your cloud storage).

It has a great Word (and OpenOffice) plug-in for citation and bibliography management, but what if you want to use it with LaTeX?  After trying and tweaking several different options being tossed around to integrate the two platforms, I recommend the following (it works with Zotero standalone or Firefox).

1. Get the Better BibTeX plugin installed for Zotero
2. Get the autoexport plugin installed for Zotero (Update:  Better BibTeX now has its own auto-export feature, thanks Emiliano!)
3. Set Better Biblatex to export bibtex citation keys in a format you like (I go for (first author lastname)(publication year) and have auto-export set on trigger mode to automatically export a new BibTex file to your LaTeX document folder (or separate folder if using a filepath) whenever a change is made to the Zotero database.

Simple!  Now you get all the functionality of Zotero, the flexibility of Better Biblatex, and a system that automatically coordinates the two.