What Is Zotero and Who Is It For? Zotero is a citation manager commonly used by students and researchers. This is for good reason as it is an open-source free to use citation manager that is designed to support academic research projects. Zotero is a powerful tool with a small learning curve for new users to benefit from a balance of accessibility and functionality. Using Zotero, users are able to collect and organize research sources into a library that is easy to navigate.