Love at first cite...

THING 14: CITING & REFERENCING

Post title refers to JS, obvs.

I definitely didn't have a method in my referencing madness when I was studying for my UG degree. Having never been taught at school, and although some lecturers did mention in brief passing about some website online where you could store stuff like websites, I didn't act on it and try it out. Instead I relied on various ‘favourites’ lists in various browsers (a downfall), scraps of paper and book lists, Amazon wish lists (?) and library ‘saved books’ lists too. I also tended to issue books to myself even if I never removed them from the library so I could keep some sort of paper trail and I painstakingly typed out all the referencing and bibliography too – it’s all about that current awareness and using ‘tools’ to make life easier I should of embraced at the time, right? If I chose to do it all again in a Masters, I make a promise here to make my life easier by using them! 

Although I have no use for using these tools at present (not for myself, or to support the needs of our library users) I understand the importance of being aware. In one of our online catalogues Encore, for example, there is a button ‘Export to RefWorks’ and I have only been asked about it once. Unfortunately, as we’re not an academic institute per se users have to use their own institutional Athens/Shibboleth login to access so I’ve never had the chance to play around with it to understand it’s full use and benefits. Helpful for those that know how to use it so it seems – and this is why I think the ‘free’ online options are perfect for achieving the same goal. Sadly, I enjoyed looking through the comparison table in Wikipedia… I like to compare most things, and I really never knew there were so many options out there to choose from. 

So out of the 3 offered in CPD23 (Zotero, Mendeley and CiteULike) I have heard the most good things about Zotero (although Mendeley, helpfully, has an app and organises PDFs too) – and I could see me using this in the future as it kind of emulates my link –> favourites fascination but would bring it all together in one place. But then Mendeley is a keen organiser of lots of different things and CiteULike offers article recommendations so you can discover as well as store. I can’t download at work, so playing around with it will have to wait for now though. Sometimes it’s helpful to just be aware of the names of these tools so you can give researchers a good place to start and allow them to explore the things available to them independently.