Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

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.