Referencing

You collected a whole bunch of articles and resources while reading, now, how can you organize them all?

To organize your references, you may consider including a reference management system into your workflow.

Methods include: downloading a reference manager, or creating a note for each reference.

Academic References

• typically used with academic journal articles and books (or situations where you’d like to formally cite your references)
• a reference manager will make formatting these types of references much easier (ex. APA, MLA, Chicago styles)
• a citation key ¹ may be generated, so you can copy and search for the exact reference used
• an app like Zettlr can even integrate with reference managers by using BibTex libraries
• you may still want to keep a separate folder of literature notes (see Types of Notes)

Reference Managers

• Comparison List on Wikipedia
• popular managers include: Zotero, Citavi, Mendeley
• you may have access to the paid reference managers through your academic institution, otherwise many of the software available are free

Zotero

• you can quickly add references if you know the ISBN, DOI, PMID, or arXiv IDs:

• you can download a browser extension that can add and auto-populate fields

Other options

• if you don’t want to deal with a reference manager you can create your own system of managing them:
  • keep a separate folder with ‘reference notes’ - these can even be combined with literature notes (see Types of Notes)
  • title each note/filename as a citation key ¹
  • simply link to this note as needed