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BO4102: Research Methods for Herbal Science

Organizing your research

After finding and selecting appropriate resources for your research, you need to be able to organize them and cite them.

Organizing

The library recommends you use a tool to help you with this - we use Mendeley, but there are other high quality product such as EndNote (fee-based) or Zotero (free).

Mendeley creates a library of your citations and PDFs; it allows you to highlight sections of a PDF and insert your own comments.  Once you create a Mendeley library, it's available online so you can keep working on projects even if you don't have your laptop with you. The free version is what we all use at Bastyr - allows you to save about 3,000 PDFs and is designed for Macs, PCs and mobile devices. 

Let the Mendeley Toolkit get you started...

Citing 

Citation is required every time you refer to a resource, quote or idea that is not your own. At Bastyr we use APA and AMA Style - these style manuals provide specific rules and examples for citations and formatting.

To manually create citations, refer to our citation guides; Mendeley will format citations for you, and many databases provide autogenerated citations now.  However, when you use a tool to format citations, you still need to know enough about citations to double-check it's accuracy!