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Tagged: Referencing
One of the key areas where Librarians have been welcomed into curriculum subjects (usually for ‘one-off’ support lessons) is citing and referencing support, particularly for coursework. Indeed, some of Darryl’s early work on FOSIL developed out of the need to support IB Extended Essay students in this area, among others. Although our inquiry work is now much broader than just coursework support, this need still remains and my support for it is now strongly informed by my experience as EPQ and HPQ co-ordinator at my current school.
I used to centre the technical side of this on teaching students to use the in-build tools in MS Word. While reasonably good, there were a number of down sides with these. Some types of sources were not well supported (and not consistently supported across Mac and PC) and so required fiddly work-arounds, and the because the tools themselves only exist in the app, they do not work on iPad Pros or Chromebooks, which were becoming increasingly prevalent even when we left Oakham in September 2021. The range of referencing styles available is also narrower than some of the online tools, so isn’t the best preparation for university.
I have been meaning to shift to teaching an online citation manager for a while, but the barrier to entry was high because it meant redoing all the support materials that I have built up over many years, including this detailed LibGuide. This year I have taken the plunge and made a radical shift in my support for citing and referencing (across EPQ, HPQ and coursework), moving my teaching to Zotero (Zo-TER-o) and ZoteroBib, and I’m so glad that I did. The tools are relatively easy to use and provide a lot mor functionality than Word. They do require some teaching as the auto-generated references sometimes need quite a lot of tidying up – but this is easier for many students than starting from scratch.
In case it is helpful to anyone I have included the notes in the next post that I have put on our school coursework support Team for our teachers – along with an offer of support sessions to introduce students to the tools. I set up this Team earlier this year as a place for staff to ask questions and share good practice relating to coursework across all subjects.
I have also added my ZoteroBib Quickstart Guide to the FOSIL Group resources – this also works with full Zotero (but I am intending to produce another guide for that later in the year).
[Post I made on our NEA and Coursework Team for teachers explaining the two tools]
Tool 1: ZoteroBib (short projects and small bibliographies)
Tool 2: Zotero (full version) (longer projects and larger bibliographies)
Which citation style to choose?
To make life easier for all of our students and prevent confusion, I have recommended that our school sticks to just two citation styles.
Note some interesting 2023 research by Mendeley into commonly used citation styles has APA way out at the front on 56% – it wasn’t a fair comparison for footnote styles though because they had only been released on the platform the previous month!
I chose Zotero because:
It would be interesting to hear what others are using and why – and how you are getting on. I’m fairly early in my journey with these tools, but already feel we have made a huge leap forward from the Word tools (not least because I can now easily support footnote referencing, where I couldn’t before, and because Chromebook and iPad Pro users are not excluded).
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