EDU 510 Statistics and Research: Writing Your Paper

Some tips on writing your Literature Review: Video: Literature Review

There are many Citation Management tools on the market today. Here is a list and summary of just a few.

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RefWorks ($$) is one of the easiest citation management tools to use. RefWorks is web-based for easy access from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection. Using RefWorks, you can easily add citations to create your RefWorks library and generate bibliographies from your RefWorks library.

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Zotero is also an easy-to-use open source (free) tool that is accessible via the web—it actually lives right in your browser! Using Zotero, it is especially easy to capture and save citations found on webpages, and to add notes and other information to saved citations for efficient and creative organization.

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EndNote ($$$) is a very sophisticated citation manager that offers the largest number of citation formats and options. The files reside on the computer which does not make it dependent on an internet connection; it does offer a basic but less functional Web based option; it is considered more difficult to learn and use.

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Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. Automatically generate bibliographies, collaborate easily with other researchers online, easily import papers from other research software, find relevant papers based on what you’re reading, access your papers from anywhere online, read papers on the go, with their new iPhone app, etc..

When it is time to gather all of your notes and start writing the paper, avoid the most common mistake - plagiarism. Plagiarism is not only taking large parts of someone else's work and not attributing credit to that author; paraphrasing sections of a work, even using synonyms and citing the work, is also plagiarism.

• Use direct quotations to support the paper's thesis.
• Rethink and rewrite the author's original idea and express it in a new way.

Even if the ideas are rewritten, the source of the idea must be cited and the author given credit.

For further information, see

• The OWL at Purdue is an excellent online resource to help you cite properly.