Learning Becomes Her

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 ...

Before even starting my PhD program, my advisor-to-be encouraged me to adopt a reference manager. Her reference manager of choice was Zotero , a free desktop manager with browser extensions available. She recommended this over EndNotes or RefWorks because it wasn't university dependent and I would be able to start building a repository that could continue with me throughout my career. I had started using it, but, for many reasons, I found it more of a hindrance than a help and I used it sparingly. Then a colleague sent me an email (also before starting my program) to a series of blog posts by PhD2Published entitled "My Love Affair with Mendeley or How Mendeley is Basically My Brain" Parts 1 , 2 , and 3 . It sounded interesting and more convenient to use than Zotero, so I downloaded the desktop manager. Luckily, it syncs with Zotero, so I didn't lose any of the references I had already collected. Even though I downloaded it shortly after reading the blog po...