Over the past few weeks, I’ve been organizing my citations in preparation for proposal writing. I’m really terrible at the citation-management process; I just let pdf’s pile up in folders on my desktop, putting them into a citation manager every few months. The reason I put this off is the process is so tedious – hand-entering citations is about the last thing I ever want to do.
Today I’m going to share some tips that may make your citation-management process less painful. If you’re a grizzled academic you probably know all this stuff, but fellow grad students may benefit from this. First and foremost, I use BibDesk as my citation manager. BibDesk is for the Mac, it is free, and it is one of the best pieces of academic software I’ve ever encountered. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a citation manager.
The first bit of advice is with regards to the citation-import process. This is fairly general advice and not specific to BibDesk. If you’re tired of hand-entering citations, many times publishers will provide downloadable citations from their websites. For example, if one of your papers is hosted by Sage, Sage’s site will allow you to download a citation directly into your citation manager. Generally these sites will provide the citations in various formats; the good news is that BibDesk will import almost anything. As an example, here’s a link to a paper. To download the citation, simply click on the “Download to citation manager” button and you’re set.
Different publishers have different approaches and techniques, so you’ll have to sift through the sites to find the option for downloadable citations. ScienceDirect is particularly stupid, requiring you to be logged in to download citations. Other sites spit out invalid files, so you’ll have to touch some stuff up by hand. Its somewhat incredible to think that publishers haven’t got citation exporting right, but I’ve learned not to be surprised by academic publishing.
Now, if you can’t find citation exporting on the publishers site, the academic search engines Google Scholar and Microsoft’s Live Academic provide downloadable citations. To turn on citation downloads in Google scholar, open the preferences and select “Show links to import citations into [your bibliography manager].” A link will appear next to all search results allowing you to export the citation directly into your citation manager. Beware, however – the results are often incomplete, incorrect or referring outdated versions of the paper. However, I’ve saved more time than I’ve lost with Google Scholar, so it might be useful to you as well.
The previous tips will work with any citation manager; my next tips are BibDesk-specific. BibDesk is built for integration with LaTeX, which works fine for some of my papers (but not all). Sometimes I just need to export a list of APA citations which I tack onto the end of Word file. Unfortunately BibDesk makes this difficult by default. To solve this problem, you need to use Templates.
With export templates, you can define a custom format for exporting citations that can be included in a document. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in for exporting to APA (or any other format that might be useful). I was able to find some APA-like examples, but none that fit APA exactly. So I went and hacked on a template, and now I’ll share it here. Linked here are two templates, that you can import into BibDesk. The first is APAInlineTemplate.txt, which will generate the (Lastname, year) inline citations you can include in your document. The second is APAFullCiteTemplate.txt, which will generate full citations to include at the end of the document. Download them both as a zip file here.
To install these in BibDesk, open up Preferences->Templates, and then click the plus button. To install, give them names (“APA Inline Citation” and “APA Full Citation” work for me), then select the files (you’ll first want to move them to ~/Library/Application Support/BibDesk/Templates). Use txt as the type. Once you’ve got them installed, right click on citation in BibDesk, select the “Copy Using Template” dialogue, and then select an APA style. You’ll now be able to copy APA-standard citations directly out of BibDesk for inclusion into your document.
I should also note that I am only responsible for hacking these templates – I believe I downloaded the originals from the BibDesk site and modified them. I’ve added conditionals to make them more forgiving (say, you don’t have the Address of the publisher) but there may be weirdness if you’ve got funky data. And the template doesn’t address every style of publication – but it covered most of what I had in my library. To find out more about templates, read the BibDesk wiki page here, and here’s a link to the manual.
This stuff is pretty dense – it took me a while to figure it out, but I’m glad I spent the time. BibDesk is now much more useful to me, and I hope I’ve saved some time for you as well.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
