If you are like me you have a million research projects going on at the same time in various stages of completion. No matter what stage of the process you may be in your current project, one thing is always driving us - the literature. When academics say "literature" we aren't talking about the books I am reading my daughter every night. Most often we are talking about peer-reviewed sources, like journal articles.
Having easy access to journal articles and citations is necessary for efficient, beast researcher mode. This summer I am not teaching, so my goal is to be in this mode the whole time. Writing a literature reviews is everyone’s favorite part of research right? I personally struggle with keeping track of articles that I find and piecing them together in meaningful ways.
Recently our e-learning center at VSU had a training on how to use Zotero. This is a free citation management system that I started to use back in graduate school (around 2009) and stopped using when I got lazy. A citation management system is any organized way to sort and store information about the sources that you want to cite and draw from in your research. Most of us were introduced to the index card method in elementary school in which we wrote out the reference citation on one side and important quotes or a summary on the other side of the index card - these cards were then sorted to outline an argument or alphabetized to list in the bibliography. Pretty much the next step up from that would be the annotated bibliography or just an Excel spreadsheet with references list in terms of metadata or other key information.
Zotero is definitely an upgrade from your homemade spreadsheet. However, you can export citations and your notes into a spreadsheet if that is your jam. Zotero comes with a plugin for Chrome and other browsers so that you can add the metadata and link to an article automatically with the click of a button. Here is a screenshot of my database on my desktop, which can be sorted by author, publication date, as well as journal/type of publication.
You can also access your database remotely from the Zotero website. It is also a really neat how you can select a certain keyword and then see which other keywords are used within that group of sources. In this screenshot are sources with the keyword "Self-regulation." Pro-tip: Capitalize any keywords that you manually add to sources so that they merge with the ones from databases.
Some other features of this citation management system that I am enjoying include the group function in which you can share sources with others that you are working with. I don't really work alone on any research project so I anticipate using this often. Another feature I really like about Zotero is the timeline feature. Creating a timeline of sources is especially useful if you are trying to write a systematic review or the history of a particular phenomenon in your field. In addition, Zotero can be used within Microsoft Office to add in-text citations and references lists into your manuscripts directly. I am sure there are many other useful features to discover.
I plan to diligently use Zotero this summer and require my research assistants to, as well. How do you manage your references? Will you give Zotero a try? Let me know how it goes. Happy Writing!
Having easy access to journal articles and citations is necessary for efficient, beast researcher mode. This summer I am not teaching, so my goal is to be in this mode the whole time. Writing a literature reviews is everyone’s favorite part of research right? I personally struggle with keeping track of articles that I find and piecing them together in meaningful ways.
Recently our e-learning center at VSU had a training on how to use Zotero. This is a free citation management system that I started to use back in graduate school (around 2009) and stopped using when I got lazy. A citation management system is any organized way to sort and store information about the sources that you want to cite and draw from in your research. Most of us were introduced to the index card method in elementary school in which we wrote out the reference citation on one side and important quotes or a summary on the other side of the index card - these cards were then sorted to outline an argument or alphabetized to list in the bibliography. Pretty much the next step up from that would be the annotated bibliography or just an Excel spreadsheet with references list in terms of metadata or other key information.
Zotero is definitely an upgrade from your homemade spreadsheet. However, you can export citations and your notes into a spreadsheet if that is your jam. Zotero comes with a plugin for Chrome and other browsers so that you can add the metadata and link to an article automatically with the click of a button. Here is a screenshot of my database on my desktop, which can be sorted by author, publication date, as well as journal/type of publication.
You can also access your database remotely from the Zotero website. It is also a really neat how you can select a certain keyword and then see which other keywords are used within that group of sources. In this screenshot are sources with the keyword "Self-regulation." Pro-tip: Capitalize any keywords that you manually add to sources so that they merge with the ones from databases.
I plan to diligently use Zotero this summer and require my research assistants to, as well. How do you manage your references? Will you give Zotero a try? Let me know how it goes. Happy Writing!
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