I wish I could recover the hours I lost early in my doctoral journey managing sources and citations. I spent hours organizing PDFs into subfolders by topic, fixing and re-fixing formatting errors in bibliographies, reordering bibliographies, and responding to editor feedback because I failed to add or remove a source when adding or deleting a paragraph. I deluded myself further, thinking I’d catch situations where I had deleted my last reference to a source or needed to modify the year in a citation if I used two or more sources from the same author and year. In my early writing days, I fooled myself, “I’m only using this source for this assignment” or “I’ll remember to remove the entry from the bibliography if I delete this paragraph.” Manual citation management distracted me from reading, writing, synthesizing, and collecting data. Citation management is a solved issue; there is no reason to interact with any citation or bibliographic entry more than once.
After my third semester at Baylor, I started using Zotero, a computer program that manages sources and citations. I learned how to use it inside and out. Now, if an editor wants a citation format fixed, I fix it in Zotero, and it will be correct every time I use it. When I search for articles and find one I want to keep, I use the Zotero browser plug-in to load it into Zotero’s database and attach the article. I create folders and subfolders in Zotero to organize articles, but it is easier to use its built-in search capability to find what I need. When I insert a citation in a paper, I use the integration with Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer to manage the citation and automatically create the bibliography. With one click, I can even change the paper’s citation form (APA, MLA…).
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