Hi my name is Thomas Skov Jensen and I work as an information consultant at the university
library of the Technical University of Denmark In this lesson, I will look at references
and I will talk about reference management and explain how creating a good workflow with
regard to references will help you during your writing process.
But why should you concern yourself with reference management in the first place?
First of all, it will improve the quality of your academic papers.
Secondly, it will make you work more efficiently and
Thirdly, it will make it easy for you to manage your references.
Sound academic work is characterized by consistent use of references. But what is a reference?
Well, in this context, a reference means the textual reference to another work of literature
or a piece of information - for example when you refer to or quote from a book, an article,
or a website in your paper. The format and actual location of the references may differ
but the basic principles are the same. You must be able to see exactly which part
of the text is being cited and all the references in the text must appear in
a bibliography at the end of your paper. You use references to enable the reader to
distinguish between your results and conclusions and the results and conclusions that appear
in the literature you have studied and used in your paper.
This is a balancing act. If a substantial part of your paper consists of quotes from
other people’s work, your paper will lack originality. If you neglect to add references,
however, your work may appear subjective and unscientific.
In any case, you should keep in mind that the references you use in your paper have
two purposes: First of all, they provide documentation for
the part of your text that draws upon other people’s work so that the reader can identify
which parts of the paper are the result of your intellectual efforts and which parts
have been written by others. Secondly, the references that make up the
bibliography must enable the reader to identify the documents in question. In other words,
it is not enough simply to provide an author’s name and a title – you must state exactly
where and when the document was published. Which of these metadata that is necessary
for the precise identification of the document in question will depend on what document type
you are referring to - whether it is an article, a book, a patent, a website or something else.
In your paper, you must demonstrate that you master the art of citing and creating bibliographies.
Luckily, there are tools that can help you – so let’s turn our attention to the Reference
Management Tools. When you begin to look for information and
literature for your project, it is absolutely essential that your workflow is structured
and consistent. In addition to the literature you find yourself, your teacher or supervisor
may present you with additional sources and suggestions for particular documents that
may be central to your research. Keeping track of all the different documents you find when
you begin searching in databases and online can be difficult.
The best advice in terms of avoiding a veritable chaos at this stage is to use a reference
management tool – preferably before you do your first searches or at least very early
on in your research process. There are several advantages of using a reference
management tool. First of all, it will make your information
seeking structured and efficient. Secondly, it will help you keep track of all
the references you use in your paper. Consider the reference management tool as your own
private library that you can expand and develop as your work progresses.
Thirdly, it will give your references, quotations and bibliography a consistent and professional
look Reference management tools come in many shapes
and sizes. Some of the more famous ones include EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero and Mendeley
All of the basic reference management functionalities that we touched upon just now will be available
to you through these tools. In other words, it is not important which
tool you decide to use when you begin collecting references – the most important thing is
that you start using a reference management tool.
And remember that you will benefit from the collection in your reference management tool
if you need to work on a similar research field at some point in the future.
In this course, we will introduce you to Mendeley and therefore we recommend that you use this
particular reference management tool during this course.