Thing 21: The End(note) is near at the close of this (Zot)ero...er, era...

Er...not sure that one's going to hold up, my friend...
Image by Papertrix

Cam23 2.0 is coming to an end and so is my traineeship...so it seems incredibly apt to focus on what happens at the end of a long effort...in academia, that's usually the dreaded bibliography. It seems so simple but the perils and the pitfalls are many; one too many sloppy references and you're headed for a plagiarism charge, so it makes sense to spend your time ensuring that everything is as perfectly referenced as possible.

But how do you get to that point? And why should you take all that time when, really, it's not necessary? I actually used to enjoy compiling my bibliography as an undergraduate (Gareth, you're not alone...) - I've always found formulaic things relaxing, but of course I was really just procrastinating, and I still managed to get some of the punctuation or the formatting wrong. Besides, the accuracy was dependent on my keeping good notes on everything I'd read, and the bibliographies that I'll be producing in York will be considerably longer than my undergrad efforts.

Is this how time will seem, as my postgraduate years stretch out
before me? Image by Darren Tunnicliff

Luckily, there are quite a few different options out there to help ensure that your bibliography is relatively stress-free. I'm not going to look at Mendeley, though I've heard good things about it; instead I'm going for two extremes - the intuitively easy Zotero, and the ridiculously complicated Endnote. I define them based on the ease with which I was taught how to use each program; Zotero took around 15 minutes with an excellently prepared session by Catherine at FAMES, versus a two hour session at Computing services accompanied by 40-odd pages of notes for Endnote. It seems ridiculous when the end result is virtually the same, plus Zotero is free, PLUS it is accessible from anywhere. Endnote is developing its "web" arm but the registration process is onerous. In all honesty, I'm fairly sure that I've forgotten most of what I learnt already...apart from the fact that the one thing that was incredibly easy to do in Endnote was deleting everything you'd been working on. And this is how they must be judged - the main advantage of reference management software is the time-saving aspect, and if the software is so unwieldy, complicated and linked to one lone PC, then I might as well have done it myself and got my geeky kicks at the same time.