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Medical Research Guide

Research Process Guide

What is the purpose of documentation?

Avoidance of plagiarism is an important function of documentation, but not the only one. In addition to providing  attribution, documenting your sources properly enables other researchers to quickly locate and consult supporting articles and web sites that have contributed to a project. Accurate documentation also contributes to the quality of future research by providing "bread crumbs" that other researchers can use to develop their own research. Creating notes and bibliographies used to be a tedious and arduous task, but modern researchers escape such drudgery when they use an effective citation manager.

Need a quick way to create documentation for a single simple project?

ZoteroBib is a quick and easy utility that produces notes and bibliographies in over 9000 available styles.  

If you plan on doing a long-term research project, need to reuse the research you collect for multiple projects, or need to create a shared research library of citations, you will be better served by by downloading and installing Zotero on your computer.

What is a Citation Manager?

A citation manager is a program or "app" that collects and organizes the documentation for the articles, books, web sites and other sources you use to support your research. Using a citation manager takes the frustration and guesswork out of constructing notes and bibliographies and inserting them into your research.  

Campbell University offers RefWorks to those with a Campbell email address. If you do not have a Campbell email address, try out Zotero. It's free and highly effective for managing documentation.