2.2 - there are so many pdfs: citation managers save lives
i make very few recommendations about things i think all scholars should be doing.......but citation managers are one. listen to this episode to find out my reasons why - and learn my favorite piece of software to use (hint, it's free!!) for this. you truly cannot imagine the amount of information you will need to keep organized as a scholar - citation managers are a key part in dealing with that, and can really help you out!
resources mentioned:
step by step tutorial for zotero
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
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All I have is anecdotal evidence, but I'm pretty sure that one of the main sources of guilt for academics when it comes to their workflow is how they are or are not using the citation manager.
In fact, the angst goes so deep that I have often joked about making a t-shirt that says the best time to start a citation manager was birth. And the second best time is today. Because so many people feel so locked up about how they are using the software, how they're not using it to its full potential or maybe how they're not using it at all. So let's get into citation managers, how and why you might want to use them. And some of the lesser known features that I think are even more valuable.
Now I make very few universal recommendations as a coach, as in, I think that most people, if not everyone should be using this tool or doing this technique. But citation managers come pretty close. I think that most people, most of the time should be using a citation manager simply because you will encounter so much literature, pieces of research, primary sources, all sorts of things. The material that you accumulate as an academic scholar is mountainous. You can't, you truly can not conceive of how many PDFs you will encounter over the course of a PhD program, or goodness knows a multi-year multi-decade academic career.
So citation manager is simply put a piece of software that stores all of the citeable information about the pieces of information that you have, like title and DOI, And publisher in one place so that you can find them. It's like a list of everything you've checked out from the library, although you control it and you put it in and you don't have to read everything that's in there .
The other thing that citation managers do really well and their first and primary function was to export and automate your citations. So you will interface this piece of software and the most common ones are Zotero, Mendeley, and Endnote. You'll interface a piece of software with your word processor, like Word.
You'll click a button and then it'll automatically insert a properly formatted citation, whether that's a footnote or a work cited, whatever the style demands. Super useful, Right? If all you ever use a citation manager for is to help format your citations, and even if you're inconsistent about what you put into the citation manager, I still think they're a good use of time. They are not perfect for sure. You do often have to adjust a few things. You might have to double check the formatting. But it really helps save both the records of all of the pieces of information that you've come into contact with. And saves you a lot of time when it comes to the actual formatting work.
But there are so many other features of these citation managers that I think deserve some consideration in your reading and research and maybe even writing workflows.
I love the ability to create collections inside of a citation manager. You might create a collection that you share with your department called best texts to teach this topic with, and everybody can update it and it automatically syncs between devices.
I love creating collections for special interests or reading groups or keeping things organized. I love nothing more than organizing bits of information on my computer. Please don't ask me to organize anything in my real physical life. I won't do it, but I will noodle around in my citation manager, making collections.
But the fact that you can share some of these create libraries and keep them updated. So, so useful.
I have what many people would refer to as shiny object syndrome. So I need to keep as much of the information about whatever I'm doing in one program, because the instant that I click out of said program, the more likely it is that I'm going to end up in some wild corner of the internet, where I didn't intend to be.
And I love that citation managers will let me store my notes with them. It's sometimes we'll let you append PDFs. Although the storage of that can get tricky. Storage management is a whole other episode of this podcast, but you can keep your notes right with the citation. So you can remember, oh, that was this edition of the book that had these page numbers, or it was this publication that I was encountering at a conference or whatever.
Your notes can be as detailed or as scant as you want, but having them right by the citation information makes it so much easier to trace your steps back later on. You can also in many of these software programs, Create tags, which can really increase searchability. So I have tags in my citation manager for actually read this or skimmed this, or decided not to read this.
I have tags that refer to different methodologies. I have tags about the decade that something was published in and I have tags about clusters of researchers that published together. So I can see the different schools and it's so useful to then go through and filter and say, okay, show me all of the things that were published in the eighties with this method that came out of this lab.
Boom. It's so hard to do that in any other piece of software and that ability to sort of keep things, add information, add rich metadata can really pay off the more you invest inside of that citation manager, and the bigger that collection is.
This can help you keep track of all of the things that you could and have already read. And as any academic will tell you, managing your reading pile is one of the most daunting and ongoing tasks. You literally never finish it. So having a piece of software that helps you keep track of what you've read, what you've cited, that thing that somebody mentioned to you down the hallway, all really helpful because you can't keep it all in your brain.
Some of it will escape. So the more of it that lands in the citation manager, the more likely it is that you won't have to duplicate that work when you have to go back and say, what was the name of that paper that somebody mentioned in our symposium last week or two weeks ago, or that I taught with a year ago? It'll all be right there.
So I recommend that you store literally everything in your citation manager, the things that you teach with tag them with the syllabis tag them with the semester that you taught at, or the institution that you did. The things that you read in your own courses, the things you read for exams web sources that you come across, book reviews, put it all in there.
It doesn't mean you're going to read it all, but it means it's a central place to go looking when you're trying to piece back your research path.
I really recommend that people use a citation manager, especially if you have a lot of sources, if you are someone who really only has a handful of things and you can keep them all easy in your finger tips, and you really enjoy the process of constructing a citation, go for it. But I really recommend that if you're going to be working with say more than 25 or 30 sources over the course of your scholarly lifetime - And spoiler alert, you will be! - Use the citation manager. Help yourself keep track of some of it.
Now a question that I often get is Katy. I haven't really used my citation manager or I started using it. Do I need to stop everything that I'm doing and spend the next two weeks, putting everything in there and tagging it and note taking it so that it's all there. And my answer is as fun as that sounds, it's actually probably not a good use of your time.
The best thing that I have found is to build it organically, as opposed to trying to create a very elaborate schema. And then putting everything into that citation manager. All of the big three come with a web clipper which goes right into your internet browser. It lets you push a button when you're surfing on a page that, you know, Google scholar or J STOR or wherever you're getting your information and it automatically sends it to your citation manager. You might have to do a little bit of cleanup and tagging to make sure that it's good, but you can with a click of a button automatically import those things. So wherever you are right now, get in the habit of starting to do that. Tag, when you need to use tags, add folders when you need to use folders, but start to build it wherever you are. Because like I said up top the best time to have done this is when you were born and just kept track of everything that you've ever read for your entire life Always. But the second best time is to start investing in it now.
Last, but not least, a software recommendation. I recommend Zotero to everybody because it's free. You don't pay for it. It's a piece of open-source software. It is regularly updated. There's a very robust online support community. I've linked to a bunch of things in the show notes to help you out there.
I also think Zotero is the easiest to use. And I think it's one of the ones that has the most flexibility with what things it pairs with, what word processors, it plays the nicest with other pieces of software that you might use. But you can also check your university library and software showcase because oftentimes they have resources, guides and discounts on software. So it might be that your university really supports EndNote and they give you a great discount on it. That's a good reason to start using it, if that's what makes sense to you.
But definitely look for something that has a web clipper, that has the ability to tag and sort, and you'll be well on your way to having more organized citations . Not just when you're ready to press publish on that paper, but also you're organizing the work and the material of the research process across your many, many projects.
Thanks so much for listening and I will see you next week.
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