Using Endnote
Identifying and organizing academic sources will be an important part of the work in this course, because it is critical to understanding how measures of behavior were originally developed and then evolved over time.
All students at Northeastern have access to Endnote, which is a common and good citation management program that can plug into Microsoft Word. Endnote also allows (up to a point) sharing of references and the associated PDF files.
Every time you find a new source of information, including not only academic papers, but also other materials such as websites or reports, that source should be entered properly into your Endnote library. To the extent that we can (based on the number of people in the class), we will use an Endnote shared library.
Whenever a reference is added to Endnote, please do the following (which will be demonstrated in class):
- Load the class Endnote shared library. You will be able to do this once you provide the email you use with Endnote to Prof. Intille.
- Check that someone else hasn't already entered the reference (if so, just add to the existing reference).
- Create a new reference and enter the appropriate "Reference type". Usually this will be "Journal article." Use "Conference paper" for peer reviewed papers in technical proceedings.
- Enter the title, author(s), journal, pages, volume, etc. as accurately as possible.
- Enter in the "Label" field: AMBClass16S and, on the next line, your name (e.g., StephenIntille) (Check for typos!). You will be able to use these labels to setup "Smart Groups," to be demonstrated in class.
- For websites, be sure to enter the Accessed Data and Year and URL, and try to print the website page as a PDF.
- In Endnote's "Notes" field, explain in a nicely written paragraph or two why you think the article is important for someone trying to understand the behavior you have selected. This information will show up when we use Endnote to create an annotated bibliography.
- For all references for which you were able to find a PDF file, we want to attach that PDF to the document. Further, when you have found the actual instrument that is described by the paper, you should attach that as a PDF file as well. Once all the information above is correct, pull attach the PDF files. Endnote will automatically rename the files using this format: [Last name of first author]-[Year]-[Start of title].pdf. If you ever want to email the file, you should use the renamed version. For the most part, though, you can "share" a reference just by putting it in the shared library.
The easiest way to get this information entered is by using the citation export functionality on the digital publication search sites such as Pubmed or the ACM Digital Library. Prof. Intille will demonstrate how to do this in class. Sometimes, though, you will still have to manually add or correct information in the entries. We will be picky about this formatting. Here are some guidelines:
- Use this style for titles of Journals: "Journal of Social Psychology" (it's ok to leave the short form if that is what a citation manager exports (e.g., "J. Urban Health")
- Use this style for titles of articles: "This is an example title: Capitalize after a colon"
- Use this style for titles of books: "This is What a Book Title Will Look Like"
- Make sure when you enter author information, it is always LastName, FirstName MiddleInitial (e.g., Intille, Stephen S.) or LastName, FirstInitial MiddleInitial (e.g., Intille, S.S.) That way Endnote will always format the names properly, even for complicated cases.
- If an article is in a proceedings, enter the name of the proceedings as "Proc. of the IEEE Conf. on Ubiquitous Computing"
The easiest way to find the actual articles as PDFs is usually to go through the NEU library search page, as demonstrated in class. However, sometimes that won't work and you will need to search the web, use Interlibrary Loan, or (gasp!) go to the actual library and find a resource. If all that fails, you can often write the lead author of a paper and nicely ask for a PDF.
Finally, if you find a survey for paper, in addition to the paper itself, attach the PDF of the survey to the Endnote reference as well as the paper.
Following the strategies above makes it very easy to find and cite academic sources throughout the semester, and will allow the class to work better in teams.