So, on to the first action on my PDP (well, the first one I've decided to tackle anyway). I've been meaning to look at, and use, a referencing tool properly for a while now.
When I first looked at Zotero back in August 2011, I actually quite liked it. So I thought trying it out again would be a good place to start. Unfortunately, the things I originally loved about Zotero (how user-friendly it seemed, the fact that it automatically attached full text where a PDF was available) either didn't seem to happen anymore, or had become so unintuitive (at least to me) that, after spending a good hour or two playing with it, on at least two separate occasions, I gave up.
My next port of call was Mendeley. I knew I'd found this less intuitive than Zotero in the past, so I wasn't surprised that I wasn't especially keen on the product when I tried to use it again. Although at least it didn't keep jumping me back to the start screen for no apparent reason every time I clicked on something, as Zotero had been doing. Another disadvantage to Mendeley was that I couldn't see anywhere to add my own notes to an article, which is really important for me.
My final possible referencing tool was RefWorks. I had shied away from using this a little, as it's a paid-for piece of software. UWE, where I work, does have a subscription to it, but what happens if I use it, rely on it, and then leave UWE? The obvious answer to this is to make sure I export all my references before I go - and in RefWorks this, thankfully, is fairly simple to do. The one problem with that is that RefWorks does have a place for personal notes, but they don't get exported along with the reference. In a worst case scenario this would mean copy and pasting all those personal notes alongside each reference - which leads me to the question; if you're organised, is this really then any better than using Word to store your references? Perhaps not a popular question amongst librarians who advocate and support using referencing software, but maybe one that we should be asking.
For the time being though, RefWorks does do everything I want it to, and is fairly user-friendly. It's also easy to use at home and at work thanks to UWEs very simple 'log-in once' system. Using it also means that I'm learning more about a piece of software I'll potentially get asked questions about at work, so it is beneficial to me in another way. As I've already started to add a couple of references to it I'll continue to do so, but if I didn't exist I'm not sure I'd see adding my references to a Word document as a particularly worse option. But then, I am very organised and will format my references as I go and pretty much always remember to add them (and notes about the text) to a Word document. RefWorks actually means I have more work to do in one go here, as although it exports references in the wanted format, they still need to be checked and corrected as they're never 100% right.
Having said all that, maybe if you're a less organised person a referencing tool like RefWorks or Zotero is a better choice than a text file for managing your references. You decide...
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