Using EndNote

This summer I'm teaching a class on research and writing that is used to prepare our IT Leadership graduate students for their Master's thesis.  In this class we review the research skills they have developed in their classes and advance these skills so they will be ready for their thesis.  We also work on enhancing their scholarly writing to stand the more rigorous requirements of the published thesis.

This year I have encouraged our students to  enlist the use of bibliographic software, like EndNote, to help organize their literature sources and ease the burden for formatting all of their references.  I use EndNote consistently with my research and find it valuable to refer back to articles I have read and to store my notes for these articles.  I hope to instill similar patters for my students.

One thing that seems to get in the way for my students application of this software is the automated cite-while-you-write functions EndNote has with Word.  This seems to be adding complexity on using the software that scares students away.  However, if we use a more manual integration of EndNote with our writing the software is very easy to use.  In order to encourage this more simplistic approach to using this bibliographic software I created a video demonstrating how I configure and use EndNote for my research.

Hopefully, a more basic application of the bibliographic software will encourage students to apply the software to help them manage their literature sources and enable them to be more efficient in building a literature review for their research papers.