Word Processing, APA 6th edition, Reference Management Software

Linda has updated the textbook website for chapter 6 at http://dlthede.net/Informatics/Chap06WordProcessing/chap6.html

I completed a couple of journal article peer reviews, in addition to edits of student papers over the last couple of weeks. While I empathize with the time it takes to learn a citation style, it is relatively painless to use reference management software, such as Endnote, Zotero, as well as a host of others.  Wikipedia has a fantastic page that compares reference management software at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software.

The reference section is a common area for errors.  Wrong author names, titles, journal names, volume & issue numbers, page numbers, and missing doi's, are the top problems I see.  Commercial software, for example - Endnote, allows the user to search databases such as PubMed.  Endnote also allow the user to search for full-text articles, and to import files and folders with PDF documents.  If the PDF article includes metadata - Endnote uses it to create an associated citation and files the PDF in a PDF folder.The imports require little or no edits and citation and the creation of a reference list is done with mouse clicks.  Commercial software may also come with word processing templates for the various citation styles.

I created an APA template for Chapter 6 on word processing.  The template uses the latest (revised) APA 6th style and can be downloaded from the website noted above.