Sunday 19 March 2017

Thing 21: Managing citations

The post behind this assignment sends us to Zotero, ORCID, and Google Scholar.

Zotero

This round of 23things has taken me further with Zotero than I've been before. In my 2010 post, I wrote that I had attempted to use Zotero a couple of years previously, but been deterred by the facts that "I had to download Zotero machine by machine, and could use it only with Firefox".  For this '23 research things' assignment, done on my home laptop, I've succeeded in embarking on a Zotero library via Chrome, and ventured an in-text citation in Open Office Writer.  By the time you read this, I may have seen how I get on using my workplace computer's Firefox and MS Word.

I expect that my two principal uses of Zotero will be these: 

(i) to keep track of material used in Alumni Festival presentations, as in my abortive experiment of 2008 

(ii) to help any library users in their own explorations of referencing software.

ORCID

I have set up an ORCID account for myself in the same spirit as Librarian at heart, who signed up for ORCID even "while I may not be publishing papers any time soon", and with similar motivation (cf. (ii) above): "it’s useful to know how ORCID works as the University is trying to persuade everyone to get one, and it’s good to be able to offer advice based on experience when people ask".  And, like ResearchGate, Academi.edu, LinkedIn and some less serious sites, ORCID will be a way of tracking down visitors, donors, and other library users we might lose sight of.

Google Scholar

I have set up a Google Scholar account for myself, again with no prospect of papers any time soon.  I don't intend making it public.  I was glad to find that Google Scholar offered one publication of mine (amongst those by several other people with similar names) for inclusion in my citations list, a gratifying discovery even though the number of its citations stands at zero. 

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