Week 6: Creating and maintaining EndNote libraries

4 September 2007

SUMMARY OF LECTURE SIX

I really enjoyed this week's topic as I can see its immediate relevance and usefulness. Having done the annotated bibliography (in UPC0002) and spent a long time making sure that my referencing was correct, I can see what a blessing this program will be.

Referencing is an integral part of academic writing and EndNote is a program that when given the correct information will do it for you in any format you choose. It can be used by itself or can be integrated with word to "cite as you write" (probably a bit difficult to use initially until we have mastered using the stand-alone program). EndNote will store information in chosen fields like author, year, title, for an ever-increasing list of references and will display the chosen style of referencing at the bottom of the page. It will also manage lots of different types of references like conference proceedings or journal articles etc.

It is probably advisable for me to start a new library for each unit and as we progress it may be necessary to have a new library for each assignment. Backing up the libraries is something that I must be careful to do as it could be disastrous to lose a long list of references. I am glad to have the opportunity to practise using end-note and am looking forward to it.

SUMMARY OF WORKSHOP SIX

This week we had to practise using EndNote by setting up an EndNote library and using the given references, generate a bibliography in APA 5th format. We then had to cross check it with the ECU referencing guide and create a screen capture as a record in our blogs. I also downloaded a copy of End Note to my home computer so that I have it at home for future use.


Reference list

One problem that I encountered was that when typing the authors names into the fields in EndNote, "et al" was taken to be an author's name and I could not work out how to change this. Once I had the reference list in Word, however, I was able to manually change this. Other than this, I was amazed at how easy the basic program was to use.