Writing tools – Kernel Panic

March 26, 2025April 25, 2025

Reference Management Software

Reference management software is used to maintain a database of bibliographic sources, including user notes and attached files. The software can be used with a word processor to automate the process of inserting citations into the text and producing formatted bibliographies. This post will provide brief introductions to three different reference managers: (1) RefWorks, (2) Zotero, and (3) JabRef. Of these, RefWorks is provided to the Holy Cross community by the Library; the others are free to use but may charge a fee for additional features and data storage.

RefWorks

Holy Cross subscribes to RefWorks and provides it to the campus community. You can create an account using your Holy Cross Gmail address and a password. Go to the Holy Cross Libraries web page How to: Use RefWorks: Create An Account for instructions on setting up a RefWorks account.

RefWorks is web-based and runs in your computer’s web browser. RefWorks references are stored in the cloud, on the RefWorks server.

Once you create a RefWorks account, you can sign in to your account at https://refworks.proquest.com or, if that doesn’t work, from the RefWorks link on the Library web page noted above. After signing in, you should see the RefWorks home screen, which looks something like this:

[Click on image to enlarge.]

There are several ways to get references into RefWorks. all of which are accessed via the Add button:

To add a reference manually, click Add, then select “Create reference manually.” A window will appear that allows you to choose one of many reference types (Book, Journal Article, Personal Communication, etc.) along with numerous fields where you can enter the various parts of the citation (Title, Authors, Journal, Pages, Publisher, etc.). There are many additional citation fields to choose from, and you can also create your own custom fields.

While manual citation entry is available, there are more efficient ways to import citations into your RefWorks database. An advantage of using RefWorks is that references found in the numerous databases of the Holy Cross Library can be exported directly into RefWorks. This is done not from inside of RefWorks, but from the results page of a search conducted in one of the Library’s bibliographic databases.

To do this, first be sure that you are logged into your RefWorks account. Then, log into your Holy Cross Libraries account. From the menu at the top of the page, click on Research Databases. Choose a database to search; for this example we’ll use Biological Abstracts. Do a search; you will then see the results of the search displayed as a series of citations.

To the right of each reference you will see a folder icon with a plus sign on it. Clicking this folder icon will add the reference to a folder. As you add multiple references to the folder, the folder contents will be displayed to the right of the page. When you are done adding references to the folder, click the link for Folder View:

You will then be brought into the “Import references” window of your RefWorks account; click the Import button to bring in the reference. If you then click the button labeled “Go to Last Imported” you will see the imported reference.

To import more than one reference, the procedure is slightly different. From the same results page of a search, click the checkboxes to select multiple references. Then click something like “Save to a file formatted for direct export to RefWorks. It won’t actually create a file; it will bring the multiple references into your RefWorks account as described above for a single reference.

The exact procedure for directly exporting references to RefWorks from a database search may vary according to which database is used, but the principle should remain the same.

To create a bibliography . . .

To illustrate the use of RefWorks with a word processor, we will use Microsoft Word. You need to install a helper tool into Microsoft Word to allow access to your RefWorks account from inside of Word so that you can insert references into your text and create formatted bibliographies. From your RefWorks account, click something and then install the extension and whatever.

Zotero

To download Zotero, go here.

JabRef

To download JabRef, go here.

June 28, 2017

Poster Design with PowerPoint

This post offers some guidelines on the design and printing of academic conference posters for Holy Cross students, staff, and faculty. While it focuses on the use of Microsoft PowerPoint to create posters, it is not a general treatise on how to use PowerPoint. For that, see the PowerPoint Help Center. Here we offer a few tips on how to tweak PowerPoint for optimal poster printing. The examples are shown as they appear on the Mac, but users running PowerPoint under Windows should find similar functionality. We also briefly discuss the use of LibreOffice Impress and Google Slides in poster design.

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December 1, 2016

RStudio as a Research and Writing Platform

R (r-project.org) is a programming language and software platform for statistical computing and graphics, widely used in academia and industry (see Introduction to R). RStudio is an integrated development environment for R. RStudio makes R easier to use, and it also enables the creation and rendering of plain-text documents that contain embedded R code. With RStudio, you can encapsulate the code and data for your analysis within the text of your paper, fostering research transparency and replicability of results. An increasing number of scholarly journals are requiring that authors submit such replication materials as a condition of publication (see, for example, The AJPS Replication Policy: Innovations and Revisions), and are providing guidelines for data archiving in support of reproducible research (e.g., Reproducible research and Biostatistics and The Role of Data Repositories in Reproducible Research).

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September 22, 2016

Research Tools for Google Docs

Google Docs (google.com/docs/about) has evolved to the point where it is a viable alternative to desktop word processors (see 10 Reasons to Love Google Docs and 6 Tips for Writing Your Thesis in Google Docs). It works completely in the cloud, so that you can access your documents from anywhere, on any device, even without an Internet connection. Documents are easily shared and editable by multiple people simultaneously. In addition, an increasing number of add-on tools make Google Docs an even more powerful solution for writing research papers. This post discusses some of the tools and add-ons that will help you write your research paper using Google Docs.

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November 18, 2015

The Plain Text Workflow

(Microsoft Word must die.)

The Plain Text Workflow is an alternative to writing with a word processor. Mind you, I said writing, not typesetting or formatting, which is a major part of what word processors do. The idea of the plain text workflow is that you separate the act of writing from that of producing a formatted, typeset final document. You initially capture your words using a plain text editor, perhaps using a lightweight formatting language like Markdown. Then, using freely-available software such as pandoc, you translate your plain text document into whatever file format you need to provide (to a colleague, reviewer, literary agent, journal editor, blog post, email, website, etc.), be it Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, PDF, HTML, or whatever. You might also bring this translated file into your word processor to continue tweaking the formatting. However, your original words are captured in one or more plain text files, which remain the source from which various other document formats flow. With the plain text workflow, you work in plain text, and all of those other document formats are outputs from your plain text source document.

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