Issue #6: Build-a-bibliography

Hi researchers and happy New Year! Aidan here 👋 One of the most important things a researcher does is read. We know that over the holidays many researchers like to catch up on reading, so in this New Year’s issue of RaC, I wanted to share the process I use for collecting, reading, organising and referencing papers.

An incredibly smart friend of mine completed a master’s degree a few years ago. As part of it, she wrote a lengthy dissertation, some 20,000 words, which included pages and pages of references and footnotes. 

“What referencing software did you use?” I asked her. 

“What’s that?” She replied. 

Reading papers, articles, blogposts, reports (etc.) is a core part of being a researcher. But keeping track of what we’ve read and then putting all the fiddly references into the correct format is time consuming at best, infuriating at worst.

Many of us already know about referencing tools like Zotero or Mendeley - software packages that take the pain out of exporting citations in the correct grammatical format.

But knowing about a tool isn’t the same as mastering it. And putting references or a bibliography into your paper is only a tiny part of research. In my experience, the best researchers have a whole process for finding papers, organising them and analysing them. A piece of software that exports their bibliography at the click of a button is just a bonus. 

I don’t profess to have the perfect system for building your bibliography, mainly because I don’t think there is one. We all have different preferred ways of working, so you need to find a system that works for you. 

But there are four key stages any researcher could benefit from putting some process around: collecting papers, organising them, reading them and, finally, referencing them.

(Here, ‘papers’ means everything from academic articles through to blogposts and anything in between.)

My process is built almost entirely around the aforementioned and open-source software Zotero. Here’s what it looks like:

1. Collecting: when I come across an interesting paper or article the first thing I do, before reading it, is add it to my Zotero. I do this by using the handy ‘Add to Zotero’ extension that’s available on most browsers, or adding the DOI number or the pdf to my Zotero library.

2. Organising: once the paper’s in my Zotero list, I’ll add it to a subfolder. I organise these by project or by topic, to give me a list of all the papers relevant to things I’m working on or thinking about. (I also have a general ‘to read’ folder - but let’s not talk about that because it’s far too long and growing too fast…)

3. Reading: recent updates to Zotero mean you can store docs in the programme and sync them across devices too. So when it comes to reading, I can open the papers in Zotero on my laptop or ipad and highlight text and add notes. As I much prefer to read papers in a comfy armchair on a tablet, rather than at my laptop screen, this has been a gamechanger for me.

4. Referencing: lastly and most wonderfully, Zotero lets you export citations for papers you’ve saved, in whatever format is right for you, at a simple click of a button. It has saved me countless hours of formatting footnotes and references. (I hope if you’re just learning about this kind of software now, it’s before you submit a huge essay, not after…)

As I say, that’s just one process. It works for me but its not the only way to find, organise, analyse and reference papers.

For example, Jenny uses software called Readwise for collecting and reading papers and some of our peers use Obsidian, Notion or Roam to make and organise notes alongside their reading. There’s also Mendely and Endnote too, which are similar to Zotero. 

The key thing I hope you take away from this issue is the idea of turning your reading and referencing into a process.

So if you have a virtual pile of papers to peruse, why not try some productive procrastination from reading and work out a process that you like? And if you do, share it with us - we’d love to know what other ways people approach their research reading!

Happy reading and happy new year!