In my lab, we are using Zotero to keep track of all of our references for the comprehensive literature review we are conducting of the school climate for diversity literature. I was interested in being able to conduct some form of network analysis on our references in order to see what articles and frameworks are being cited the most. However, with over 12,000 references, it would be extremely time-consuming to do the analysis by hand.

Zotero has a helpful feature that allows you to tie references together, so we are using this feature to connect articles that cite each other. All I needed was a program that could automate the creation of the data file. Thus, ZotNet was born.

ZotNet takes the articles in a Zotero library and outputs a file that can be used in a free network analysis program called NetDraw. It will help us take our massive database and make sense of the connections within. I hope others will find this a useful tool as well!