Literature search
and citation manager
Lukas Lehotsky
How to choose right sources?
How to choose right sources?
• Goal is to chose authoritative and reliable sources
• Focus on publications in well-known journals and publishing houses first
• Rough guide of paper relevance (beware, not all the time!) is the number of
citations
• Critically evaluate quality of the examined papers
• Use articles and books as sources of sources
• Check sources used within articles
• Check papers which cite the original article
• Use more recent papers first – use old papers only when these are seminal
works (e.g. very important)
• Triangulate your sources (for each information, check more than one source)
• Mind authors' background and affiliation
How to choose right sources?
• If there’s enough academic sources on the topic, avoid
• Reports and position papers from various institutions and organizations
• Newspaper articles
• In almost all cases, avoid
• Wikipedia (serves at most as a springboard to sources)
• Websites with no authors and/or dubious sources
• Blogs, vlogs, social networks (unless you use their content as data)
• Heavily biased sources (unless you need to point out a normative
position/stance)
Literature search tools
Beware of “grey” literature
Beware of cherry-picking!
Engage only if you find papers
truly useful (relevance)
Many vs. few sources
Citation management
Citations
• Most commonly, Chicago citation style is used at the Department
• Citing is time consuming activity
• There are many applications which simplify the process
• MS Word internal citation engine
• Well integrated
• Can’t accommodate other styles easily
• Can’t integrate data import
• External services (Mendeley, Zotero, RefWorks, …)
• More sophisticated functionality
• Might not work an all computers, there are sometimes issues with integration
Citations in MS Word