A Canonical Zotero Configuration for Vietnamese Academic and Educational Writing

Vol 4 of the Document Engineering textbook series (Citation and Reference Management) for Vietnamese learners aged 14 and up requires a canonical reference-manager configuration that survives the AI-era reference-manager landscape consolidation, handles Vietnamese-language sources with full diacritic fidelity, exports cleanly into the Pandoc + biblatex + XeLaTeX toolchain used by Vol 3 and the program-level LaTeX papers, and remains operable by a single learner across at least two devices without infrastructure beyond a free Zotero account or a basic WebDAV endpoint. This paper specifies that configuration. The configuration choice is Zotero 7 with the BetterBibTeX plug-in, four installed CSL styles (APA 7, IEEE, Vancouver, and a Vietnamese journal style derived from TCVN 7217-1:2007 and ISO 690:2021), a fixed item-type template set for Vietnamese-specific sources (laws, ministerial circulars, theses, university journals, online dictionaries), a sync architecture defaulting to free Zotero cloud for metadata plus WebDAV (or local-only) for attachments, a folder-plus-tag taxonomy that mirrors the program's research-node structure, and a grouplibrary guideline for the Vol 4 capstone collaboration activity. The configuration is derived from five criteria: Vietnamesename handling without manual rewriting, CSL style coverage for the operational target set, LaTeX export fidelity through BetterBibTeX, sync model survivable on free-tier infrastructure, and longevity through anchoring in the open Citation Style Language standard rather than in any single vendor's metadata schema. The companion-template folder layout for tools/zotero‐template/ is specified in section 4.9; the folder itself is not created by this paper (that ship is the artefact deliverable, separate from the synthesis). The configuration is mapped to a specific Vol 4 foundational chapter; trade-offs versus AI-era reference managers (Paperguide, Logically, Paperpile) are discussed but the comparison-matrix deliverable is reserved for H5.2.