EndNote

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!

New: RefWorks! Collect Citations and Auto-Format Bibliographies

Now you can automatically create bibliographies in three simple steps! After creating an account on the RefWorks website, collect all your research citations in one place, and then use the RefWorks program to automatically create citations and format bibliographies in your papers. You can access your RefWorks account from any computer connected to the internet, and you can even keep your RefWorks account as an alumnus. (1) Start by making an account on the RefWorks website. (2) Next, as you do research, use library database features or the RefWorks browser plugin to automatically send citations to your RefWorks account. (3) Finally, use the RefWorks Microsoft Word plugin to create citations and bibliographies for your paper. (Mac Pages users can use a slightly different process outlined here.) To learn more about using the program, see the RefWorks company’s series of tutorials here. And don’t forget, Northeastern University also provides a subscription to EndNote. Which one should I use? In general, RefWorks is better for undergraduates and researchers needing to share references, while EndNote has a higher learning curve but more features and is better for graduate students, faculty, and staff involved in deep research projects. For more information, see our in-depth comparison chart. Contact us if you need help with RefWorks or EndNote!

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.