Easy and Breezy with Peace in My Mind: Annotated Bibliographies in Mendeley
I really love Mendeley, y'all.
I haven't needed to create an annotated* bibliography in many years, so it took a bit of research to learn if Mendeley would do this for me. Turns out, it will. Some sources I found within the Mendeley community indicated that citation styles could be modified to include an annotation and then applied to the references in a document. Luckily for me, annotated bibliographies in APA style must be common enough that this is already a style available within Mendeley.
To generate my bibliography in Word, I inserted each source as an in-text citation, set the style, and selected "Insert Bibliography;" I then deleted the in-text citations (as they were unnecessary in this case) and reviewed my references for style inconsistencies. As I mentioned in my previous Mendeley post, however the information is stored in your reference manager is how it will appear in a bibliography. Because I knew these sources would be cited in APA style, I was able to modify the entries as I found the sources to comply with the style. Most of the style errors you're likely to see are in capitalization (especially for titles); these are easy to convert into sentence case from the Home tab of the ribbon in Word and then modify as need be.
The other thing to check when adding a new source is the abstract (if you care about having the abstract included). Depending on the source, Mendeley may not pull the abstract or it may pull the abstract and the beginning of the introduction. Sometimes it will pull the abstract and a disclaimer or notice from the publishing site (I've seen this most often with articles found on JStor). Another thing to look for is hyphenated words that shouldn't be hyphenated (such as prac-tices); this happens most often with articles allow words to wrap to the next line; at times, Mendeley sees the hyphen indicating the word continues onto the next line as part of the word. Again, this is something easy to fix while you're gathering sources, so, for me, it didn't complicate the process of generating an annotated bibliography.
All in all, a pretty painless experience.
My topic for this assignment, for those interested, is instructional design and technology in programming education.
*The use of annotated here is not in the sense I'm used to. This is simply a bibliography with the paper's abstract included. You can edit and modify bibliographies in Word (after allowing Mendeley to generate the citation for you) to include your full annotation of the source. You could also add this directly into the abstract field of the source's entry in Mendeley.
I haven't needed to create an annotated* bibliography in many years, so it took a bit of research to learn if Mendeley would do this for me. Turns out, it will. Some sources I found within the Mendeley community indicated that citation styles could be modified to include an annotation and then applied to the references in a document. Luckily for me, annotated bibliographies in APA style must be common enough that this is already a style available within Mendeley.
To generate my bibliography in Word, I inserted each source as an in-text citation, set the style, and selected "Insert Bibliography;" I then deleted the in-text citations (as they were unnecessary in this case) and reviewed my references for style inconsistencies. As I mentioned in my previous Mendeley post, however the information is stored in your reference manager is how it will appear in a bibliography. Because I knew these sources would be cited in APA style, I was able to modify the entries as I found the sources to comply with the style. Most of the style errors you're likely to see are in capitalization (especially for titles); these are easy to convert into sentence case from the Home tab of the ribbon in Word and then modify as need be.
The other thing to check when adding a new source is the abstract (if you care about having the abstract included). Depending on the source, Mendeley may not pull the abstract or it may pull the abstract and the beginning of the introduction. Sometimes it will pull the abstract and a disclaimer or notice from the publishing site (I've seen this most often with articles found on JStor). Another thing to look for is hyphenated words that shouldn't be hyphenated (such as prac-tices); this happens most often with articles allow words to wrap to the next line; at times, Mendeley sees the hyphen indicating the word continues onto the next line as part of the word. Again, this is something easy to fix while you're gathering sources, so, for me, it didn't complicate the process of generating an annotated bibliography.
All in all, a pretty painless experience.
My topic for this assignment, for those interested, is instructional design and technology in programming education.
*The use of annotated here is not in the sense I'm used to. This is simply a bibliography with the paper's abstract included. You can edit and modify bibliographies in Word (after allowing Mendeley to generate the citation for you) to include your full annotation of the source. You could also add this directly into the abstract field of the source's entry in Mendeley.
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