While in my BSN program, I quickly discovered that reviewing research articles is one of the most important skills in nursing education. For good reason, everything relies on evidence from peer-reviewed research.
Keeping track of one or two articles and their references is not hard. They tell you to buy the APA Manual, but nobody really does, so I just went to a citation generator I found online. With a copy and a paste–done!
And just like that, I got points deducted for citation errors. I didn’t capitalize something and forgot to put a period somewhere else. But whatever. I still got a good grade.
After a few classes, the deductions got worse. I got lower and lower grades simply for citation errors.
Enough was enough, I thought. After four classes, I purchased the APA Manual. I sat down and actually read it. Highlighted it, even.
To nobody’s surprise, I discovered that it really wasn’t that hard. And to this day, I have not received a single deduction on a grade for citation errors. Yay, me! But this was not the end of my citation frustrations.
Citation Overload
As the courses became more intense, the number of articles became increasingly harder to keep track of. I was spending a lot of time trying to keep the in-text citations and references page organized. It was frustrating and time consuming.
Until I came across a note on the library’s website suggesting a computer program.
Zotero
Zotero is a program to solve my exact problem. Their website says it’s “a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.”
With it, I can paste the DOI number of an article, and it provides the entire citation. Sometimes I have to tweak the title of the article to match the correct APA format (it sometimes capitalizes every word in the article and I have to make it “sentence case”). However, with that one edit, it saves the citation forever.
I now have a huge catalog of every research article I’ve needed for school. I’ve used references from previous courses without having to find them again in the database. This program has single-handedly made my school work easier and more manageable.
If you’re in school, I highly recommend giving this program a try.