billso.com

See http://billso.com/apa/ for help regarding APA formatting and style.

I’m testing a web-based research tool called Zotero. I hope this free service can replace bibliographic database products like EndNote and Citation. I’ve recommended that software to IS 6100 and professional paper students. However, both products cost over US$100 for the student versions.

Zotero is free. It’s an add-on that can be installed in the Firefox web browser. The database is saved in that computer. I’m looking for a way to overcome this limitation. Zotero will not work well or at all with Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari.

Like other software packages, Zotero can capture citation information from web pages. This is a very helpful feature, especially for users who are dealing with long reference lists. Users can import listings directly from EBSCO and ABI.

It’s also possible to add photos from Flickr and materials from the Internet Archive. Zotero keeps adding support for more sites, and web site developers can add some support on their own. Yesterday, I added Zotero support to this blog. Zotero users can click the icon in the address bar to add a billso.com article to their Zotero library.

Zotero also plays nice with Microsoft Office and its leading freeware competitor, OpenOffice. The OpenOffice software can be downloaded from its web site.

One feature I want to try is file management. Zotero can import PDFs and other documents into its search database. I usually save web pages and articles as PDFs for long-term storage.

Of course, a big reason to use any bibliography manager is auto-formatting. Any decent bibliography package, including Zotero, let users build a reference list. The software then creates a list with the user’s choice of formatting, such as APA style.

Please note that I will not require my IS 6100 and IS 7010 students to use Zotero or Firefox, of course.

I’m doing a guest lecture on action research in Larry Rowland’s IS 6000 course in a few minutes. The PPT file is here.

As I promised on Monday, I have posted a brief example of the reference list format for Paper 4 and the final exam. It’s the second PDF document link on the Paper 4 web page.

I’m doing a guest lecture tonight in Larry Rowland’s IS 6000 course. My topic is action research, and I’ll discuss several methods that MSIS students can use to complete the professional paper sequence.

Here is a PowerPoint file with annotated slides that I will use during the talk.

Here are a couple of pages from this site during tonight’s talk:

I have a page full of information about writing papers in APA style. It’s listed as “APA style” on the main menu of this site. My example of an annotated bibliography is here, and is also listed under the section about Lesley University.

This page has two relevant sections. One is a discussion of how to write research papers. The other examines the concept of authority in peer-reviewed articles. This page is listed as “References” on the main menu of this site.