1. Video 1: Citation generators
2. Video 2: Advanced reference managers

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Video 1: Citation generators

Hello, and welcome to this recording of the library training session 'Reference Management Tools - An Introduction'. My name is Beth and I'm a Learning and Teaching Librarian at The Open University.

This recording is split into two parts. This first video will introduce the session and cover some simple online citation generators. The second video will talk about some more advanced and sophisticated reference management tools.

After watching these two videos, you'll be able to choose a reference management method that suits your individual research needs, recognise how reference management tools work, identify the benefits and limitations of reference management tools, and find additional sources of support for reference management tools.

This session is about introducing what reference management tools do rather than focusing on the details of any one particular tool. It will be particularly useful for Level 3 and postgraduate students who may be managing lots of references, but all kinds of students can benefit from thinking about different reference management methods.

Before deciding whether to use a reference management tool, you may find it helpful to think about your reference management needs and preferences. Here are some prompt questions that can help you with this. Firstly, how do you currently organise and save your references? If your current method works well, you might not need a new tool at all. But if you've found yourself getting in a muddle with your references, a reference management tool could help.

What is your organisational style? Do you like things to be filed away neatly, or do you work best with papers and notes spread out? These are just two different ways of organising yourself. No way is right or wrong, but it's useful to think about how you work and whether a reference management tool would suit your organisational style.

What type of project or assignment are you doing? If you're working on a research project or an extended essay, you may benefit from organising your reading materials in a systematic way. And finally, how much time do you have? You'll need to invest time setting up and learning a new tool, so it's important to consider whether you can commit the necessary time for this.

There are lots of ways that you can go about storing the articles and books that you read for your assignments. There's no single best way. It's all about what works for you. If you're at level one or two and not using that many references, a Word document, card file, or Excel spreadsheet might be all that you need. However, if you're working with a larger number of references for a bigger project, then you might want to consider using a tool specifically for managing references, such as a citation generator or a reference management tool.

Out of those last two options, I'm going to talk about citation generators first. These are online tools that automatically create in-text citations and reference lists in various referencing styles, including Cite Them Right Harvard, which is used by most OU modules. Citation generators are not quite as complicated as reference management tools, so they may be a good option if you're looking for a simpler, easier solution.

I'm now going to show you how to use one of these tools. I'll share my screen and will be going into MyBib, which is a free online citation generator that doesn't need you to have an account or instal any software to use it.

So here I am now on mybib.com citation generator. The first thing I'm going to need to do is make sure I've got the right citation style set. At the moment, it says APA 7, but I'm going to want to change that to Cite Them Right Harvard. So I'll click on where the citation style is currently listed underneath the search bar and then search for Cite Them Right 13th edition Harvard, because I want the most recent version. So now I've selected that and I know that the reference will be generated according to the right formatting rules.

I'm going to show you how to reference a web page. So I'm going to paste in the URL of a web page from the conversation about how scientists calculate the risk of someone being killed by space junk. So I've pasted in the URL and I'm going to click Search. It comes up with the web page details and I can click on this. Then it just asks me to make sure that I've sorted the capitalization correctly. And this looks fine. So I'm going to click Looks Good.

And here is the reference that MyBib has generated for me for this web page. I'll need to check that all this information looks correct, and that it's all laid out as I would want it to be. If I notice anything that looks not quite right, I can click on the pencil icon to edit and then change any details I need to.

So, for instance, in Cite Them Right Harvard 13th edition, it actually doesn't require you to include the website name when you've got a web page author and you've got the title of the web page. So I'm just going to delete that there. And if I'd accessed it on a different day, then I could change that as well. So then I'm going to click Save, and here's my reference.

I can copy this by clicking on the three dots that appear in the bottom right hand corner when I hover over the reference. And then I can click Copy Bibliographic Entry to copy what's going to go in my reference list, or Copy In-Text Citation to copy what's going to go in the body of my work to indicate that I'm referring to information from this web page.

Once I've added several sources to my reference list in MyBib, I can also download the whole reference list using the button in the top left hand corner, or I can select individual items and copy the bibliographic entries for each of the items that I've selected.

To add further references, I would go to the search bar at the top, make sure I've selected the right kind of source, and add in the URL for a website, the title or ISBN for a book, or the title or DOI for a journal article, and then click Search, as I did with this item. I'm now going to move back to my slides.

And now it's time for you to have a go. Please pause the video and go to either MyBib or ZoteroBib citation generators. The links are on the slides, which can be found on the web page for this library training session. Use the ISBN, which is the unique number for a book, or the DOI, the unique number for an article to go to the citation generator and create a reference.

Remember that you need to select whether it's a book or a journal to generate the references, and you may also need to change the reference style to Cite Them Right 13th edition Harvard. Have a look at the references that have been generated, and check whether you think you need to add or edit any of the details.

Here are the full references as generated by MyBib in the Cite Them Right Harvard 13th edition style. So for the book, we've got Zephaniah B, the author, followed by the publication date 1995, the title City Psalms, and the publisher Bloodaxe Books Limited. Similarly, with the journal article, we've got the author name, year of publication, the title of the journal article, the title of the journal, the volume number, the issue number, the page numbers, and the DOI link.

One thing to note. If you were to look up that journal article, you'd see that it was actually published in 2015, not 2014. So this is an example of the importance of checking the references produced by citation generators or reference management tools, because they're not always going to be 100% accurate. So we could always correct this reference within Cite Them Right before copying it into our assignment.

So for the final slide of this video, here's a summary of what citation generators do well as well as their limitations. So as we've seen, citation generators are useful for automatically formatting references into a particular style, such as Cite Them Right Harvard. They can pull citation details from sources when you put in basic information like titles and URLs, but they're not always 100% accurate with this.

You can use a citation generator to create in-text citations that you can then copy and paste into your work. However, what citation generators don't do is they don't allow you to store and organise your references for future use, which is obviously quite important if you're doing a larger project where you're needing to keep track of lots of sources over a period of time.

They also don't offer organisational features like tagging, sorting, and grouping your references. They don't provide options for annotating references or attaching files, and they don't integrate with word processing software. If a citation generator won't give you the functionality that you need, then you might want to consider using a reference management tool instead, which will be covered in more detail in the next video.

And a final point to emphasise. If you use a citation generator, always make sure to double check that those generated references are correct and make edits as needed. As we've seen, they're not always going to be 100% accurate. It depends on the information that the citation generator is able to pull off

Thank you for listening to this video. And for more information on reference management tools, please watch the next video.

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Video 2: Advanced reference managers

Hello. This video is the second part of a recording of the library training session, Reference management tools and introduction. My name is Beth, and I'm a learning and teaching librarian at The Open University.

The previous video discussed some simple citation generators. In this video, we're going to explore reference management tools, which offer more advanced functionality but can take some time to learn how to use. As a reminder, this session is about introducing what reference management tools do and exploring how to choose a suitable reference management method for you. The session will not be focusing on the specific details of any one particular tool.

As I've mentioned, reference management tools can be really helpful, especially for larger research projects with a lot of sources involved, but you would need to invest a bit of time to get to know one properly. In this video, I'll be focusing on the three main tasks associated with managing your references in these tools-- getting your references in, managing them within the tool, and outputting them into your finished academic work.

So what do reference management tools actually do? When you're using these tools, you can collect your references from various sources, such as Library Search, subject databases, or Google Scholar, into one central place, effectively creating your own personalised library of references for things that you've read, are planning to read, or want to cite in your assignment.

Within the tools, you can manage your references by organising them into folders-- for instance, you might label them according to a certain assignment or a certain module-- or tagging them with keywords so that you can see which ones may relate to others. You can also add notes and attach full-text PDFs and other documents. Some reference management tools also work with Microsoft Word so you can use them to insert in-text citations and create reference lists directly in your assignment.

You can use reference management tools to create references in the style of your choice, which for most Open University students will be Cite Them Right Harvard 13th Edition.

There are many freely available reference management tools out there on the web. The Open University does not provide support with any particular reference management tool, so this is just a small selection of some of the best-known options. In terms of freely available tools, Mendeley, Zotero, and EndNote Online are all fairly sophisticated, freely available tools which work with Microsoft Word. Please note that the most recent version of EndNote Web requires a subscription, but the classic EndNote Online, which is linked from the library's bibliographic management page, is available for free. So if EndNote is asking you to subscribe, just make sure that you're on the classic EndNote Online version

In terms of tools that require payment, EndNote Desktop can be purchased at a discount for Open University students via Clarivate. This premium reference management tool is particularly suited to PhD students and researchers due to its complexity and the significant time investment required to master it. Endnote Desktop is especially valuable for large-scale research projects, such as funded postdoctoral studies or a PhD thesis.

Papers is a piece of software which can be used on Apple products, and this also would need to be purchased. It's up to you to decide which reference management tool you prefer. All of these tools will allow you to collect, manage, and cite your references as described on the previous slide. You can go to the library's Bibliographic Management page to explore the different options.

No matter which reference management tool you're using, the first step is to add in the details of some references that you've identified as being relevant to your research. There are several methods for adding references to reference management tools, which we will explore now.

Most reference management tools allow you to add references either manually or automatically. If you're adding the details manually, then you need to be really careful to ensure that you're entering all the details in absolutely correctly. However, if you want to add lots of sources into your reference manager, it will usually be quicker and easier to use one of the automated ways of importing references.

For example, if you found references through a search tool like Library Search or a subject database, you can usually export your reference details from the search tool as a file, and you can then import this file into your reference manager. The most common file format for exporting reference details is RIS, a plain text file used to store and share bibliographic references. It provides information such as title, author, publication date, and publisher. I'll show you an example of how this works in just a moment.

Many reference management tools also offer a browser extension, which would allow you to click a button to add a web page to your reference manager. Another way that you can add a source to your reference library is to import a PDF of a journal article into your reference manager so that the reference manager can construct a reference based on the details in the PDF.

I'm now going to demonstrate an example of some of the ways that you can add references to a reference management tool. I'll also look at how you can manage your references once they've been added. Although I'll be using Mendeley for this demo, the principles apply to many different reference management tools.

I'm now on the home page of the library website. If I go to the Help and Support tab along the top and then click Bibliographic Management under the Referencing guidelines heading, on this page, there is a link to an activity called Selecting a reference management tool, which can help you make an informed decision on which reference management tool is most suited for your purposes.

Further down the page, you can also find links to guides and videos for some of the most popular reference management tools. I'm now going to go back to the library website to show you how to export references from Library Search.

As I mentioned, one way to get references into your reference management tool is to export them directly from Library Search, Google Scholar, or another academic database or search tool. Exporting references usually involves creating a file, such as an RIS file, which can then be opened in your reference management tool. I'm going to do a quick example search for reflective writing and university. So I click the Search button to run that search.

If I see an article that looks relevant, I can click on the Export button on the right-hand side of the entry for that item. And the Export button looks like a square with an arrow pointing right in it. And it says Click to see all available export options. And we've got a range of options here. You can print the details. You can export directly into some reference management tools like RefWorks, EndNote, or Mendeley. But I'm going to show you how to get an RIS file because you could then use this with any reference management software.

So as I mentioned, the RIS file is just a way of formatting the citation information associated with the publication or research paper so that it can be shared with other software packages like reference management tools.

So a pop-up appears that says Export RIS. There's a drop down to set the encoding, but you can leave this as it is, and then click the Download button. So an RIS file we'll now have been downloaded into my computer's Downloads file. And I could add that from my Downloads folder into any reference management tool.

I could also export multiple items into an RIS file at once by selecting them using the select tick box on the left-hand side of each item. So I'm selecting an article, an ebook, and some more articles.

And then if I click the Export button at the very top of my list of results, which, again, looks like a square with an arrow in it, and I get the same options to print details or to export to various reference management tools. I'm going to click Export RIS again and download. And the RIS file that's just downloaded will contain the details of those five different items that I'd selected.

Now I'm going to show you how to import an RIS into a reference management tool. I'll be using Mendeley for this demonstration. But as previously mentioned, you can use an RIS file to add references to any reference management tool. So this is my library within Mendeley which currently is empty. And I can click the Add references button in the top-left-hand corner of Mendeley and then Import file. It opens up a window with the files on my computer, so I'll navigate to my Downloads folder.

Initially, nothing is coming up. I just need to change where it says Adobe Acrobat Document next to the file name as being the file type we're looking for. And I'm just changing that to all files. And now it's displaying both the RIS files that I downloaded from Library Search. So I'm going to select one of them and click Open.

Then I can see that it's added in all references that I downloaded the details of from Library Search. It's worth noting that I'd actually exported the details of five references from Library Search into that particular RIS file. So one of them obviously hasn't imported into Mendeley successfully. And so I would want to look into this to try and add that fifth reference to my Mendeley account.

Another way of adding references to your reference management tool is to use a browser extension. Lots of reference management tools offer a browser extension to allow you to quickly add a reference that you're looking at online into your reference management tool in just a couple of clicks. You will need to instal the extension on your browser first. Each reference management tool will provide instructions and guidance for how to do this.

I've already got the Mendeley browser extension installed, and so I'm ready to start using it to add references to my Mendeley library. I'm looking here at the full text for a particular journal article. I might have opened this from Library Search or from looking at the article on a database. I'm going to click on the Mendeley web importer icon, which appears at the top of my browser window. If it didn't appear here, it might be under my list of extensions, which, on Microsoft Edge, looks like a jigsaw piece.

Clicking on the Mendeley icon will prompt Mendeley to scan my current browser window for references and display them in a pop-up panel at the side of my browser. I make sure that the journal article I want is selected, which I can see because the title of the article is highlighted with a tick box next to it. And then I can click on Add to Mendeley at the top of this side panel to save this as a reference in my Mendeley library.

I'm now going to return to Mendeley to check that the article is in my library. Back in Mendeley, I can see the article I just added using the browser extension at the top of my list of references. You sometimes have to refresh the view in Mendeley to see a newly imported article that you've added through the browser extension.

Now that we've covered some of the ways that you can add references to your reference management tool, I'm going to look at how these tools can help you to organise and manage your references. I'm going to continue using Mendeley for this part of the demo, but most reference management tools have a similar layout and do similar things, such as allowing you to create folders, edit the details of references, and add notes.

So as I've said, here, Mendeley displays all of the references that I've added to my account. I can click on the title of a reference that I've just imported to see all the details that Mendeley is now storing for me. A panel will open on the right-hand side of the screen with this more detailed information, such as the abstract and a link to a PDF. I can click in the different fields to edit the content. It's really important to check to make sure that the details are correct, as sometimes the information in an RIS file or that is pulled across by a browser extension will be incorrect or incomplete.

So for instance, if having looked at the article, I realised that it was actually published in 2016, I could change the year just by clicking in the box and changing the details. There are also options to add notes about the reference using the annotations or notebook features, which appear as tabs at the top of the panel with the details of that reference.

I can also use the Tags field to add my own tags or labels to the references. So for instance, I might label sources according to the topic that they're about or what elements of the assignment they relate to. And this can help me organise my library. Another way I can organise my Mendeley library is to create my own collections. There's an option to create collections in the panel on the left-hand side. I might create collections according to the different assignments that I'm working on, research topics or themes, or even just record which sources I've read and which I'm planning to read.

I can filter my library into collections and subcollections. When I click Create collection, I could say call it TMA 1, for instance, and click the tick icon to save that collection. And I could move my references to a collection by selecting the relevant references, clicking Organise, and then Add to Collection, and then selecting the relevant collection, and clicking Add.

I'm now going to go back to my slides to recap the key points from this demo. I've shown how you can add references to a reference management tool by importing an RIS file or by using a browser extension. Remember that you can also add references to a reference management tool by manually inputting the details of that particular source or by importing a PDF with the full text of a journal article.

As we've seen, you can export RIS files from Library Search, and you can also do this from most library databases. If you've run a search that's come up with lots of results that could be relevant to your work, the quickest and most convenient approach is often to collect multiple references from Library Search or from a database into the same RIS file and import that into your reference management tool.

And of course, it's really important to check every automatically added reference for completeness and accuracy. Reference management tools are never going to be 100% reliable, so it's important that you're able to quality check your references to make sure that all the correct information is included and that the reference is laid out correctly.

When we moved into the reference management tool, I needed to set my output style, which for most situations at the OU will be Cite Them Right Harvard 13th Edition. And I showed how you can manually edit your references as needed. Another option would be to search another database to see if you could find a more accurate reference to import. It's a good idea to back up your data if you're storing a lot of references in reference management tools and don't want to lose the work that you've done if something were to happen to that tool.

And we took a look at how you can organise your references into folders and collections and use tags and keywords to enable easier searching and grouping. You'll be able to develop a method that works best for you in terms of how you like to organise your references within a reference management tool. But thinking about the topics, assignments, and stages of your research process that you might want to record can be a helpful way of thinking about it.

As I mentioned earlier, when you automatically import reference details into a reference management tool, the result will only be as good as the information that suppliers put onto their websites or onto Library Search or the database. If the information is incorrect or incomplete, then the generated reference will be incorrect as well.

This slide shows an example reference for a journal article, which displays several possible mistakes that can come up in an imported article reference. The reference lists the author name in capital letters, the year of publication, 2022, the title of the article, "Marketing via smart speakers, what should Alexa say?" And the DOI, Digital Object Identifier, is listed as a number. Please pause the video and have a think about what might be the mistakes and missing information in this reference. Unpause the video when you think you have an idea.

Here's the correct reference. So the mistakes in the example were that the author's name was in capitals and that the reference didn't include the journal title, the volume number, the issue number, or the page numbers. The DOI also should have been written out as a link with doi.org, rather than simply the number.

So in this correct reference, we've got author name, Smith, K.T.; year of publication, 2022; title, "Marketing via smart speakers, what should Alexa say?"; then the journal title in italics, Journal of Strategic Marketing; the volume number, 28, and then, in brackets, the issue number, 4; the page numbers, 350 to 365. And then it says available at https://doi.org and then the full DOI number only after that.

If you're unsure of how your references should look, check out our training session The Why and How of Referencing, or you can watch the recording of that as well. You can also find examples of how references should look using Cite Them Right.

I'm going to move on now to thinking about using reference management tools when it comes to actually writing your assignments. How do you get the references out of the reference management tool and into your work? All the reference management tools I've mentioned allow you to generate a reference list within the reference management tool on your browser, which you can then copy and paste into your document. If you take this approach, you will need to manually add your in-text citations yourself and make sure that they match all the sources in your reference list.

The support materials produced by your chosen reference manager, which are all linked from the library's bibliographic management page, will explain how to copy a reference list from within the reference manager tool. Another approach would be to use a Microsoft Word add-in for your chosen reference manager. These tools help you with referencing by allowing you to insert citations straight into your document in the correct format. The add-in can then automatically create reference lists from the sources that you've added citations for in your chosen referencing style. This makes it easy to ensure that everything you've cited is included in your reference list.

So how do you get your reference management tool to work with Word? For popular tools like Zotero, Mendeley, and the paid versions of EndNote, you can instal an add-in into Word that will integrate the tool seamlessly. So first of all, you instal the Word add-in for your reference management tool. Links about how to do this for each tool are available on the next slide.

For many tools, including Mendeley, you just need to click the add-in button on the Home tab in Word and search for the relevant tool. Once you've installed the add-in, you should be able to access it in Word, either by going to the References tab and clicking on the add-in name, or it may appear as its own tab along the top in Word

You'll need to log into your account when setting up the add-in so that it can retrieve the references you've added to your reference manager. Remember to select the correct referencing style within The add-in. So for most OU students, this will be Cite Them Right Harvard. Some tools might not have the most up-to-date version of Cite Them Right Harvard, which is the 13th edition. In this case, you might choose to use a previous edition of Cite Them Right Harvard and then proofread and quality check those references to make sure they're up to date.

To use in-text citations, use the insert citation option, which looks different for different tools. And to create a reference list, there will be some kind of insert bibliography or equivalent option. The library doesn't provide support with using particular reference management tools. So for the details of how to use these Microsoft Word add-ins, we would recommend following the links on the next slide.

Whether you're using a Microsoft Word add-in or pasting your references from the reference manager tool, you will need to check and edit your references to make sure they fit with the referencing style you're using.

As I mentioned, this slide provides links to support for using reference management tools in Word for Mendeley, Zotero, and EndNote. Please note that the Microsoft Word add-in for EndNote requires you to be subscribed to a paid version of EndNote. So if you're using the free classic version of EndNote Online, then you won't be able to use the Microsoft Word add-in. Remember, you can download these slides to access all of these links from the web page for this session on the library website.

And if you want to follow up this session with further activities, the slides also contain recommendations of two activities on the library website around selecting a reference management tool and collecting references from library databases. Each of these activities will take 30 minutes and are linked from the page where you found this tutorial.

The bibliographic management page on the library website, which has been mentioned a few times in this session, is a really good place to go to check out some of the more popular tools available and to look at the help and support materials provided by those reference management tools, including video tutorials. Remember that the library does not provide ongoing support for installing and using reference management tools, so we'd recommend that you go to those links on the bibliographic management page and look at the main help sources linked there for each tool. Please refer to these resources rather than contacting the Library Help Desk for help with a specific tool.

After watching both of the videos for this session, you will now be able to choose a reference management method that suits your individual research needs. It might be a good idea to take a moment now to have a think about what you've learned through this session and which of the reference management methods might be most suitable for you, whether that's a simple citation generator, one of the more advanced reference management tools, or sticking with a more basic method like an Excel spreadsheet if you don't have that many references to manage at the moment.

You should be able to recognise how reference management tools work and identify the benefits and limitations of reference management tools and citation generators. And by referring to these slides, you'll be able to find additional sources of support for various reference management tools. Thank you for watching this video. And remember, you can refer back to these slides and the resources linked within them for further guidance on reference management tools and citation generators.

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