Week 1.1: Simplifying Citations – Management and Usage

I rather suspect that over the next two years I’ll be gathering (and by extension managing) a reasonable number of references and citations for my studies. As I mentioned in my previous post on Academic Practice, ensuring due credit is given to others for their work when referring to is both courteous and a requirement. The trick is to find an easy way of compiling, organising and managing references.

My first degree was pre-Internet. There was no Google, no WWW, no email even. Back then things were very different, positively stone-age when compared to today’s tech. My final year project was written in the DOS-based version of Word (Windows didn’t exist back then and a mouse was a creature that ate cheese), my references were collected by hand and stored in the database that was the back page of my lab journal.

Thankfully, things have moved on since then. Given the attention required to collect and manage references back then and the likelihood of missing something, I’m particularly keen to find a simple, modern solution for this course. Ideally, something that hooks straight into my blog.

The best news is I believe I have such a system. I’ve trialled it in my last two posts and I’m sufficiently pleased with the results to share it here.

Clipart courtesy Open Clipart Library, https://openclipart.org

The solution I chose was Zotero and was one of those suggested by the course tutors. I also found there is an open source WordPress plugin, Zotpress by Katie Seaborn, that connects to the Zotero cloud and can embed citations directly into a page or post.

References can be collected/added through the Zotero.org website or by the desktop application (note the desktop app will need to be configured to synchronise with the cloud and is very simple to do). Zotpress synchronises with the cloud and your references can easily be added to a page or post by inserting a shortcode.

Installation of Zotpress is fairly straightforwards and a matter of following the instructions. You will need to log into Zotero.org and head to your account settings to create an API key to give Zotpress access.

Falmouth University Citation Style

Falmouth University uses Harvard style citations but this is different from the ‘harvard1’ style built into Zotero. All is not lost as Zotero allows custom styles to be created and downloaded from their cloud.

In MacOS, select Zotero –> Preferences and choose ‘Get additional styles…’ as shown.

This will open the style repository browser dialog. Enter ‘Falmouth’ into the search field as shown then click on the ‘Falmouth University – Harvard’ link on the dialog to add it to your local style catalogue for the desktop app.

Note the style is not uploaded to the cloud and will not sync. with Zotpress so needs to be added manually as discussed later in this post.

To test the result, I created the same entries as given in the visual reference guide using the desktop application. Checking the Zotero Style Editor showed how they will be formatted. See the screen grab below.

To add the style to the Zotpress plugin, navigate to the Zotpress Options screen in your WordPress backend and under the ‘Set Default Citation Style for Importing’ choose ‘Add another style’ and enter the following text in the ‘Add Style’ field as shown in the next screen grab (Note the field is not wide enough and has truncated the ‘y’ at the end of University. The ‘y’ must be included.

harvard-falmouth-university

The two example references I created were and , as per the University’s visual citation guide (figures 6 and 7 below). These give the following bibliography:

GONTAR, Cybele. 2006. ‘Art Nouveau’. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History [online]. Available at: http://www.metmuseum.org [accessed 15 Sep 2011].
VERGO, Peter. 1993. Art In Vienna 1898-1918. 3rd edn. London: Phaidon.

As you can see the web page format is slightly different, the citation in the bibliography does not include the ‘Place’ or ‘Location’ field. This is marked as an optional field for websites (see last screen grab) so I’m hoping this will still be deemed compliant.

Reference Capture and Management

Capturing and managing references is now super simple and can all be performed within the Zotero app and website. Also supported is the organisation of references into one or more folders. This will be very useful for storing by category and also where used.

Conclusion

I chose Zotero as a solution purely on the grounds of of Zotpress plugin for WordPress. Together these three pieces of software will significantly simplify the capture, organisation and usage of references, formatting them in the style required for my course.

List of Images

Figure 1. THORN, 2020 Zotero Cloud integration with WordPress

Figure 2. THORN, 2020 Zotero Preferences

Figure 3. THORN, 2020 Style Search dialog

Figure 4. THORN, 2020 Zotero Style Editor/Viewer

Figure 5. THORN, 2020 Adding a new default style to Zotero

Figure 6. FALMOUTH UNIVERSITY, 2013 Citation format for books

References