There are many tools available for creating and managing bibliographies. Indeed, you may already use a bibliographic database management system (BDMS) such as Zotero, EndNote, BibDesk or RefWorks. If you already use a BDMS then you are free to use it in this part of the course.
BDMSs are complex tools that can hold thousands of academic papers, white papers and many other information-resource items, keeping them for easy reference. As well as storing resources, some BDMSs allow an electronic version of an information resource to be kept alongside notes you have made about that resource. The resource and any associated notes are then ready for use when you need to cite the material. In some document preparation systems (e.g. Microsoft Word) this can be done automatically.
Even the simplest BDMS requires great flexibility and is a very complex piece of software. The learning curve can be quite steep. For this reason, if you don’t already use a BDMS we suggest that you create a simple word-processing document to store the details of the few papers you might find useful to go alongside this course - perhaps something from the references that interested you.
If you already use a BDMS, you can create a new database for this course. Alternatively, you could simply copy and paste the template below into any Word/text-processing package of your choice for each new information resource that you keep in your bibliography.
CiteKey:
Title:
Author(s):
Format:
Publisher:
Year:
URL and last accessed:
Referenced by:
Abstract:
Notes:
What do you think the fields in the template capture?
The template consists of a single table with the following fields (this structure is a subset of any commercial tool’s structure, although in such a tool there may be many other fields too):
Referenced by: which other item(s) in your BDMS (if any) suggested this information resource
OpenLearn - An introduction to software development Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.