Hi all,

Here a few things that have really helped me keep track of my references and helped me created bibliographies.

  1. Obviously Google Scholar is my number one place to look for articles. If they are available as PDF versions, they tell you. If you are logged in or using a CUNY wifi network it will usually tell you if it is available at your campus. I also often use the cited by feature as I am usually searching for similar articles. NEVER PAY FOR ARTICLES!!! (see #2)
  2. It is also very important to know how to get articles from your library either on or off campus. The CUNY digital libraries are pretty good and I have found that I can get access to almost any article I need. Additionally, inter-library loan is an amazing thing where you just ask for an article that CUNY doesn’t have and within the hour they email it to you. AMAZING!!!
  3. My favorite citation organizer is probably Zotero (others are RefWorks and EndNote). It is free and can be used as a plug-in on Firefox as well as an app that you can download to your laptop. You can sync your libraries, and if you have a pdf of a journal article or the ISBN of a book, it will automatically (if in their database) fill in the citation information for you. It does have a bit of a learning curve but I can do a quick demo in the next class.
  4. I always go to Purdue Owl when I am writing a paper. It is something I keep open in a tab while I am writing. It is pretty much the go to resource on all of the rules for APA and MLA and they give you lots of examples to use. This is great for even the most basic of things like how to format your title page, abstract, headings and subheadings, running headers, page numbers, in-text citations, and everything else.
  5. If you are a science person you may want to play with Mendeley. This is a great place to organize and search for papers. I think it just uses google scholar searches but it will also recommend other papers and will cite and organize your pdfs. It is pretty much the go to for all the sciences I think. It also has a social media type component so you can network with other science people.
  6. Finally, and this is a more recent thing that I have been introduced to so I don’t know the full capacity of it, in Google Drive, under Tools is a Research button that opens up a side bar that allows you to search google scholar and google web and also add in citations. It is something worth playing with I think.

If you have any questions about any of these resources, please feel free to email me. About anything really. I will be in our class the next time we meet to talk more about this but in the meantime, play and learn so we can all share together when we next meet. Hope these are useful in some way.