Creating Quick Reference Lists – Moving towards OERs

Goals & Core Assumptions

The goal of this skill builder is to introduce some time-saving skills for creating work cited lists hassle free across platforms and software.  For this skill building activity, the focus will be in using only Mendeley. One of the main assumptions is that a computer, and not mobile device, is going to be used throughout the article researching process.

The rationale for selecting Mendeley, a free management software, is to enhance the discussion around free and open tools.  The research process can be difficult enough without adding complicated citation management software, let along ones you have to pay for.

Whenever Mendeley is mentioned it is referring to the Mendeley Desktop software, unless specifically noted the Mendeley does not refer to the browser based plug-in.

Furthermore, for the sake of concise information presentation we are going to assume that you have correctly imported and fixed all citation text fields.  While other styles are prevalent in social science research for the sake of continuity we are going to be using APA as an example.

Additionally, you will notice several QR codes throughout the document. All QR codes can be scanned via mobile device or simply clicked on to navigate to external sources.

 Introduction to Mendeley

Mendeley is a free, open-source, web-based system that assists users in “organizing research citations and annotating their accompanying PDF articles” (Zaugg, West, Tateishi, & Randall, 2011, p. 32).  Mendeley consists of two main programs, a desktop citation and article manager, and an online browser-based platform that also manages citations (Mendeley, 2009).  It makes retrieving entire libraries of reference and online repositories not only possible but also creating metadata, add-in notes, and tags easy to do when managing and sharing research (Singh, 2010). Additionally, Mendeley automatically extracts pdf details such as author names, article title, and journal name (Barsky, 2010; Mendeley, 2009), and syncs with a wide array of databases, such as EBSCO, PubMed, ScienceDirect, CiteULike, Google Scholar, and even JSTOR (Zaugg, West, Tateishi, & Randall, 2011; Singh, 2010).

The basis for the online version is centered around the trends of cloud storage and computing, which “combines the simplicity of using a web browser to access and meaningfully use the collective resources” (Singh, p. 2010, p. 62).  In both the online and desktop versions, users can fine tune their libraries by using annotate comments, highlights, document notes, and tags (Mendeley, 2009).  Additionally, information can be synchronized between the online and desktop version (Barsky, 2010; Hicks, 2011).

Where Mendeley differs from traditional reference management systems is in its social networking design (Hicks, 2011).  For more information about how Mendeley was designed check out this video explanation of the “A Last.fm for Research?” Conference Presentation.

Mendeley is based on social model used to create Last.fm (Zaugg, West, Tateishi, & Randall, 2011), a music based social networking site that organizes piece(s) of music as the key element of a user’s network, allowing for users with similar interest to connect (Henning & Reichelt, 2008).  In this way the focus drawn to research libraries and not to the authors themselves.

Using the Web Importer

One of the key features of the online Mendeley system is the use of the Bookmarker.  The browser add-on allows users to quickly add resources to their online library.  The Bookmark button works across most browsers, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.  The first steps it to go to the Import Site and drag the bookmark button to your bookmark bar. When you next chance upon an article that sounds interesting or a piece you hope to use in your next research project, simply navigate to the resource and then click on the button.  Once you hit “Save” this will sync your saved articles to your desktop program and online library. 

Integration with Word Processors 

While Mendeley mixes research article managements and global collaboration perhaps some of its most simple features can be the most useful.  It offers users the ability to format and insert references for hundreds of journal styles (Reiswig, 2010).  For more information about how to use the Microsoft Office plug-in check out this video.

The video covers key information and provides step-by-step direction as to how to install and use the plug-in.  While this feature is not as robust as some of the other reference software (Reiswig, 2010), it does provide compatibility across several versions of Office.  Not only is Mendeley MS friendly but it also integrates itself across OpenOffice products (Barsky, 2010).

For those that have become familiar with Mendeley Desktop and use the software plug-in for Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer (currently facing integration issue with the new OO update) plug-and-chug reference lists becomes second nature; but what are you to do if you are using other software? Not all users have access to MS Office products and sometimes the Mac version glitches, additionally Linux platforms and the chromebook OS are becoming ever popular across social science research (Hertel, Niedner, & Herrmann, 2003).  These add-ons are very useful, and efficient for adding citations into your word processor but often don’t have accommodations for using Google Documents. They allow users to build the reference lists while constructing papers instead of static citation inserts.

So take the idea of plug-and-chug references on the go and expand it to adding citations while writing emails, using Google Document, or e-stickynotes, or even other word processing software. Mendeley offers two options: 1) drag and drop; and, 2) copy and paste.  Both of these approaches have very similar steps, outlined below.

Select references: First open up Mendeley and select all the papers you want to add into your document.  You can select multiple entries by holding down the “Ctrl” key (on a PC) or “cmd” key (on a Mac) and simply clicking on your choice of entries.  Once you select a reference it highlights/greys-out the line.  Before we move on be sure to pick which method you wish to use: drag and drop or copy and paste. (Hint: The trick with these techniques is to order them via author before the insert step. Take a look at the image below; you simply click the author column to organize the reference list.)

Option 1 – Drag and Drop: For the option to work you need to be dragging in the citation into a platform that allows for rich text formatting; in other words you need to be able to italics, bold and underline the text.  Notepad is not an option however, Wordpad, Google Documents, email drafts and blogs are all viable options.

Not only is this a quick and convent method for transferring citations they also retain numeric properties and formatting. To drag and drop you simply use your mouse to drag the selected reference from the Mendeley window to wherever it is you want them to be listed.  As you move the reference from the Mendeley window you will see a black box as shown below:

If perchance you are trying to drag a reference into a platform that doesn’t support text formatting Mendeley is smart enough to not let you do it! So in case you run into the error – you are probably doing the steps correctly except your might be trying to put the citation in a place where you will lose the style, in that case look out for the Ø symbol.

Option 2 – Copy and Paste: When using this method, it is important to note that you can copy and paste the reference list into any platform.  This process does not restrict users in the pasting stage.  However you need to be careful, in that when pasting to plain environments there won’t be any italics or underlining.

After selecting the references you want to use go to “Edit” then select “Formatted Citation” from the “Copy As” menu.  Another way to do this is to simply press Crtl+C  (for PC) or cmd+c (for Macs).

For more information about how to use Mendeley in general, check out the 40 minute webinar video on how to use Mendeley.  Additional resources are listed below:

Butros, A., & Taylor, S. (2010). Managing information: evaluating and selecting citation management software, a look at EndNote, RefWorks, Mendeley and Zotero. In Netting Knowledge: Two Hemispheres/One World: Proceedings of the 36th IAMSLIC Annual Conference (pp. 1–47).

MacMillan, D. (2012). Mendeley: teaching scholarly communication and collaboration through social networking. Library Management, 33(8), 561–569.

Mendeley. (2012). Global Research Report. Retrieved from http://www.mendeley.com/global-research-report

Mohammadi, E., & Thelwall, M. (2013). Mendeley readership altmetrics for the social sciences and humanities : Research evaluation and knowledge flows 1. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 1–22.

Continual Development

I first began to use Mendeley via it’s online system much like I would use a social bookmarking site like Diigo or delicious. It wasn’t until months later that I switched from using alternative citation management systems to using Mendeley Desktop, due to expiring licenses. When I first began using Mendeley Desktop, I would reference the company help guides and tutorials to teach me how to use the software.  I quickly learned that the question/answer guides were initially helpful but didn’t introduce more than the basics.  What really taught me to use the system was constant playing around (basically clicking on stuff to see what happened) and continued use.  For future Mendeley adopter I would recommend that they play with the system and try out its different features; merely reading about the features in pieces such as Zaugg, West, Tateishi, and Randall(2011) don’t do it justice.

Additionally, user YouTube screencast have been extremely helpful in learning new tricks and tips.  Because the Mendeley effort has been s grounded in academia and open educational resources, users tend to share and teach their discoveries.

In the future, I plan to use Mendeley to write complete literature reviews.  I have discovered that such reference management systems allow me to create virtual file cabinets that collect, organize, and compile metadata-like repositories.  I have yet to use its collaborative features such as groups, but I hope to do that in the near future too.

 

 References

Barsky, E. (2010). Mendeley. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, (62), 8–11. doi:10.5062/F4S46PVC

Henning, V., & Reichelt, J. (2008, December). Mendeley-A Last. fm For Research?. In eScience, 2008. eScience’08. IEEE Fourth International Conference on (pp. 327-328). IEEE.

Hertel, G., Niedner, S., & Herrmann, S. (2003). Motivation of software developers in Open Source projects: an Internet-based survey of contributors to the Linux kernel. Research policy, 32(7), 1159-1177.

Hicks, A. (2011). “ Mendeley ”: A Review. Collaborative Librarianship, 3(2), 127–128.

Mendeley. (2009). Getting Started with Mendeley. Mendeley Desktop. London: Mendeley Ltd. Retrieved from http://download.mendeley.com/misc/Getting_Started_Guide.pdf

Reiswig, J. (2010). Mendeley. Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, 98(2), 193–194. doi:10.3163/1536-5050.98.2.021

Singh, J. (2010). Mendeley: A free research management tool for desktop and web. Journal of Pharmacology & Pharmacotherapeutics, 1(1), 62–3. doi:10.4103/0976-500X.64539

Zaugg, B. H., West, R. E., Tateishi, I., & Randall, D. L. (2011). Mendeley: Creating Communities of Scholarly Inquiry Through Research Collaboration. TechTrends, 55(1), 32–36. doi:10.1007/s11528-011-0467-y

Citation Management Systems & Such

I have a love-hate relationship with citation management systems/softwares (CMS)…I started using them in high school and have then varied in my ideas about CMSs.  I actually started with Endnote, and particularly using the MLA citation style.  I began using Endnote mostly because I was too lazy to type out all the citation myself, double-checking bibliographies was really annoying, and I really liked the idea of a Word plug-in. So I would type in all of my article information in Endnote and use the plug-in to simply insert the citation.  Once the citation was inserted into the body of my paper it would automatically add the full citation to the bottom of the paper. It was great!

It worked great for a while…I guess until I turned in my papers, only to get them back with notices reading “needs correction”…bright red scribbles across the last pages of my assignment.  I took for granted that the citations at the end were supposed to be correct, I suppose I expected the program to work as advertised.  Sometimes there would be a period out of place, or a comma missing, other times words were italicized incorrectly.  More times than not, it was something really small that was very hard to miss.

It was about that time (it was the red evil lettering that got to me!), that I decided that all this CMS *waves hands around in a vague gesture* wasn’t really worth it, it wasn’t worth the time and stress of having to double back and (re)check everything.  So all the time spent data entering and re-fixing wasn’t worth it unless I had tons and tons of citations that I want to host in library/bookshelf format.

I do this teetering back-and-forth thing, where I would start  project and I would start using a CMS, continue using it until the very ends.  And, other times if I didn’t begin my project using a CMS, then I won’t start using it sometime in the middle. It ended up becoming a binary decision…if I started using a CMS then I stuck to it but never started using it in the middle of a research report.  Basically a love-hate relationship.

It wasn’t just Endnote that drove me bonkers, but rather it was most of the citation management software systems.  In fact, I have used a number of CMS across my years of college and graduate education, sometimes more than not.  I have used everything from RefWorks, Endnote, to Zotero and Mendeley…I have even tried out some of the less popular CMS, such as BibTeX, Bebop, and even Noodle Tools.  Basically, anything that was free and/or available to me, or even accessible through my school, I used. (Notice none of these are really tablet applications.)

Honestly, I haven’t found one that I really love.  For shorter papers here is what I do.  I use Google Scholar to search for the text and click “Cite”. After pulling it from Google I double check it by inputting all the data into Son of Citation Machine.  The largest gap I found in using straight-up Google citation is cities of publication. Many of the books and chapters when cited have publisher information but not city of publication…which matters in APA citations.  Also Google has the worst citations for publications from conference proceedings and research center reports.

Once I have the correct information in the right citation style I house all of my references in a word document (forever backing it up across different storage systems and cloud services, just in case!) I then alphabetize them all.  It can become a little messy.  Actually, it is really messy; but, I know that because I was through at the beginning I don’t need to spend time at the end of my writing process (re)checking.  Small victories for sanity, I guess.  So instead of using a CMS, I generally, manually, type (and copy/paste) all the citation with the help of Son of a Citation Machine.

I guess you can say that I have become a tad bit skeptical, distrustful even of all these citation softwares, plug-in and browser applets.  However, as my academic endeavors have required me to write more and more literature reviews, I have returned once more to attempting to use citation management systems in an effort to organize my research better. Recently, I have been on an Endnote/Mendeley stint.  I am still deciding if it is working, or not.

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So our university has this wonderful feature where you can stream software, like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Publisher.  That way you don’t have to download them or purchase licenses for programs you hardly use.  You end up running virtual instances of the programs.  In fact, our department recently traded in computer towers for small virtual machines.  Save space. Boots faster. Maintenance is easier too. Sounds like it is moving in a promising direction…except for when it comes to CMSs.  When you are on these virtual machines or streaming software from your home computer, you can’t really add plug-ins or use the insert into text features that many of the CMS offer.  So unless you are on a personalized computer, with administrative privileges you don’t get to customize your interface to accommodate for such features.

Random aiside, I know. Sorry. Now back to the news .

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That said; these CMS are really great for generating reference lists.  These software, whether web-based or installed versions, allow for you to tag, annotate, and aggregate text, articles, and reports to create libraries.  It is these entire libraries that you can easily move around, reference and even share.

I have been often asked, “which do you like the best?” and I can’t say that I have a good answer to that question.  I do really like Zotero and Mendeley.  They are very compatible in design. I actually swap between both.  When I am just browsing the internet and digging around I mark articles and pages with Zotero.  When I am writing a paper, to which reference articles are saved in my drive or cloud, then I use Mendeley. Two different approaches or purposes, I guess.

More important that functionality or popularity, you should consider what it is that you hope to do with your citation management system.  Base your decision on what works with your platform(s) of choice and your end goals.