It's paper season over here at Nipissing. All our final papers are coming due, and although it would make sense not to procrastinate and get things done early, it never happens. However, I do have one tip that will make your life soooooo much easier - Reference as you go.
Nothing is worse then getting to the end of that massive paper and then realize that I haven't been writing out your footnotes. This means you have to go back through all your sources and find the citations, which may take just as long as it took you to write the paper.
So, my advice is to write out the citation immediately. Even if you aren't going to format it perfectly, write out where you got the information, especially the author and page number, so you don't have to go back looking for it.
The worst experience I've had with this is realizing that I didn't reference something, and had already returned the book to the library. Bad news! By now, I've learned better (it only took four years...)
Have you tried using RefWorks for citation management? Nipissing and Canadore have access to this through the Education Centre Library website:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.eclibrary.ca/links/refworks
If you do all your research on your own laptop, you might want to give Zotero a try:
http://www.zotero.org/
It's a little bit old school, but some people prefer to use 3x5 index cards:
http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/ait/knowhowtocitesources.html