citations

New Year’s Resolution to Improve Your Citation Management Skills? We’ve Got You Covered

Start your 2019 research off on the right foot with our January series of workshops and webinars! Learn the basics or focus on specific tools to help you manage citations for yourself or your research group.

Registration is now open for ten different workshops. Choose from EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero, or Mendeley, or a session that introduces all of them to help you choose one.

What exactly is citation management? you may be asking.   

Summed up, it’s a clever way to create an automatic list of references (aka bibliography). Instead of spending hours typing and arranging your reference list, you can export book and article information into a program that will autoformat it. You’ll decide on your citation style, decide on placement of your in-text references in the text, and then proofread and edit. It’s generally much quicker than entering all the information by hand into your document.

Building a shared citation library for a group project or with research collaborators? Online citation management tools can help you do that, too.

Librarians at Snell Library are available—by phone, email, in person, and by video chat—to help you use these tools. Sign up for a workshop today!

Test-Drive the Chicago Manual of Style Online!

Many of us are familiar with the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) and use it as a reference while writing. Now Snell Library is providing online access to the CMOS’s 15th and 16th editions in one easy location. New online-only features include:
  • Being able to search the CMOS and specify either the 15th or 16th edition
  • A Q&A section that answers those tricky questions as submitted by users — including a place to submit your own questions
The 16th edition, published in 2010, is updated for the digital age. All of us have run across one of those pesky hard-to-answer citation questions. “How do I reference a Twitter post? What about a blog entry? Or a podcast?” For those of you who are editors or writers, there is now an electronic editing checklist to help you in your online editing ventures. Don’t forget to check out Northeastern University Libraries’ access to the AMA Manual of Style, and here is a general guide to MLA, APA, Chicago, and CSE styles.

March Madness at Snell!

March Madness: Helpful Hints for a Successful Semester Spring break has come and gone and now students are gearing up for their own March Madness—that final stretch of the semester when the weeks race by and then, BAM, papers are due and final exams have arrived. Ready or not, it’s time to start getting research together for whatever projects you may have and Snell Library is here to help you find what you need. Check out the hints below to learn how Snell can help you get the wheels in motion: Ask a Librarian! Seriously—they know their stuff about digging up the research you need and not to brag, but I think our staff here at Snell is pretty exceptional. And really easy to get in touch with! You can meet them at the reference desk on the library’s second floor or you can email, text, and chat with librarians online. Group projects. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re a fact of life for many students. The first floor (especially the Cyber Café) is a great place to meet up and divvy up assignments. You can also book a group study room right on the library website. Finding Books and Articles. Sometimes that obscure book about realist perspective on the development of the dessert banana just isn’t available here on campus. Fortunately, interlibrary loan can help you get the things you need. You can also apply for a Boston Library Consortium card if you want to go raid BU’s bookshelves yourself. But remember, the card takes up to a day to process and it can take a little time for an article to be scanned and uploaded for you from another library. Start thinking about the research you need now so you can bang out that paper come April. Collecting citations. Creating a bibliography has never been easier. Northeastern provides a subscription to EndNote (ideal for grad students) and Refworks.com (perfect for undergraduates and researchers looking to share sources). Check out this post by Amanda to get started. Wireless Printing. You’ve burned the midnight oil, your paper is done, and you’re ready to print. Thanks to new software that you can download from myneu.com, you can send documents straight to the library’s printers from your own laptop. This can be especially helpful when you’re printing out a paper five minutes before it’s due. Not that any of us students do that… Phew! Well, I hope this list helps you out. Take it easy on those late night cups of coffee and stay tuned to Snippets for more hints on how to take advantage of everything our libraries have to offer. Good luck with the rest of your spring semester!

Citations, Quotations, Notations…Frustrations

Remember when before EasyBib you actually had to know what citation convention you were using and actually format your citation yourself? If you’re like me, of course you don’t, because we grew up in the computer age. Regardless, citations are a crucial function to the scholarly process, and withholding due credit (not citing your sources) or even citing incorrectly is frowned upon to the extent of expulsion for plagiarism. Some of the new features on EasyBib have made this process even easier by automatically citing sources based on article titles, and giving a much wider range of citation formats and documentation options. Unfortunately, you still have to cite within your actual text manually, a process that is known to be arduous and often time consuming…until now (for those of you who didn’t know about this before reading my blog post). Available through on the Self-Service tab of MyNEU, by clicking into Software Downloads you will find the answer to all things citation related. The program named EndNote, aptly puts an End to all of your Note-ation problems (I try to be funny… it usually never works). Straight from EndNote themselves…

“Millions of researchers, scholarly writers, students and librarians use EndNote to search online bibliographic databases, organize their references, images and PDFs in any language, and create bibliographies and figure lists instantly. Instead of spending hours typing bibliographies, or using index cards to organize their references, they do it the easy way—by using EndNote” (Endnote).

See the citation convention I used there? All thanks to EndNote! Some other cool functions include automatic paper formatting, template extensions, online reference searches, customizable export options, and more. So, while EasyBib may be a great tool for citations, the software provided by Northeastern will make sure you aren’t stuck in Snell Library all night.

Web of Science!

There’s been some good “viral marketing” going on on campus already, but I thought it was also worth mentioning here — the NU Libraries now offer Web of Science! We’re super-excited to finally have this powerful resource available. For those who may not be familiar with this database, it’s actually a suite of citation indexes from ISI Web of Knowledge. It includes Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index — so it’s not just science, despite the name. The main reason it’s so great is how easy it makes citation searching. Say you’ve found a good article from 1994 and you want to see how many articles after that date list the first article as a reference. Web of Science makes this extremely easy. Just enter the info about the 1994 article — usually author’s name and the journal title will be sufficient — and voila, you’ll get a list of subsequent articles that cite it. Then you can see what publications cite those articles, and so on, tracking a trail of citations up to the present day. Why is this useful? Well, generally speaking, the more a source is cited, the more important it is within its field. Maybe it’s important because it first introduced some major new discovery, or maybe it’s important because it makes a controversial claim that many other people want to debate. Either way, citation searching allows you to quickly see who the major players are in a given field, and how the dialog is continuing. It can be more targeted than regular keyword searching, too, since you can use the citation trail to follow the discussion of a particular topic. I urge all you researchers out there to head on over to the Library website and check out this terrific resource. Enjoy, and let us know what you think, or what tips you have for using it!