How Do I Keep a Record of Things that I Find?

Reference management software

Recording keeping is essential to the management of the library element of any research project. Fortunately there are now a number of computer programs that will help you store and organise your references, integrating them into word-processed documents to create those documents' bibliographies. For many years at Portsmouth we supported a particular piece of reference management software, ProCite, but this has now been superceded by EndNote. For advice and guidance in using EndNote to manage your collection of references please see your Faculty Librarian.

Other reference management software

There are an increasing number of free reference management tools on the Web, chief among them Zotero and Mendeley.

Citing references correctly

Citation is the formal recognition, within your text, of the resources from which you have obtained information.

References are the detailed descriptions of the items from which you have obtained your information.

Why cite?

When preparing a piece of work, it is inevitable that you will refer to sources written by other authors. It is essential that you provide detailed, accurate information about the sources you have used. This information must be provided for a number of reasons:

You must correctly acknowledge your use of the statements, opinions, findings etc. of other authors that you have used in your research. Not to do so amounts to plagiarism.
Citations allow others to use your work as a research source. You will be cited for this and it will do your academic standing a world of good.
Accurate citation allows you to return to your work at a later date and still make use of the research previously undertaken.

As a general rule, a citation must enable another person using your work to easily identify and locate the sources that you have used in your research.

Citation styles

To avoid confusion when using citations, a number of standard styles have evolved for the layout of citations in written work. Some of these styles are subject specific, whereas other, more general styles are also used (such as Harvard format - APA style).

When writing a piece of work, it is important that you find out what citation style is used in the organisation for whom you are writing (called the house style), and to be careful that you stick this style for the whole piece of work. The style of citation that you use affects the order in which you record the information (and what you record) so that the original sources can be identified.

Because you must always present citations in one format, it is not sufficient to copy the details in any order into your bibliography or footnotes. Your citations must conform to your chosen style. In almost all situations, correct citation and referencing will form part of the marks you receive for a piece of work. Incorrect citation will lose you marks.

The best way to stick to your chosen citation style is to use a style manual for the type of citation you must use. For all internal purposes Portsmouth University requires you to use either Vancouver format (mandatory in the Biomedical Sciences Division of the School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences) and Harvard format - APA style (mandatory elsewhere).

If you need help using these citation methods there are guides available in the Library as well as guides (both short and long) available for downloading from the University's Academic Skills Unit website.

Online resources

Referencing at Portsmouth
Research and Documentation Online:a reference guide to using Internet resources
A Guide for Writing Research Papers based on Modern Language Association Documentation (Capital Community College)
American Institute of Physics Style Manual
Curtin University guidelines on using Harvard format - APA style referencing

Bookmarks

It can be very inconvenient to have your website bookmarks - what Internet Explorer calls favorites - stored on more than one computer, as the chances of your different collections of bookmarks ever becoming synchroinised are very low. Even if you were to synchronise all the computers that you use regularly the effort involved would be considerable. The anwser to this dilemma is to store your bookmarks in just one place - on the World-Wide Web - using a social bookmarking website such as Delicious, where you can save your bookmarks as well as searching for other bookmarks on a topic that have been saved by other members of the Delicious community.

Useful books

Gibaldi, J. MLA handbook for writers of research papers. (4th ed.) Modern Language Association of America, 1995. Shelved at 808.02/GIB in the Subject Reference Collection on the 2nd floor of the Library.

Li, X. & Crane, N. Electronic styles: a handbook for citing electronic information. (2nd ed.) Information Today, 1996. Shelved at 025.344/LIX on the 2nd floor of the Library.

University of Chicago. The Chicago manual of style. (15th ed.) University of Chicago Press, 2003. Shelved at 808.02/CHI on the 2nd floor of the Library.