Research Type:

Legal/Historical Research; Qualitative

Academic Staff:

AProf Dolores Janiewski

Prof Jim McAloon

(PhD Supervisors)

Research Tools and Resources Used:

Zotero

While the project as a whole employed a number of different research and writing strategies and methods, this entry is focused on one tool that helped bring everything together and helped to save countless painful hours working with references – Zotero.

I used Zotero from day 1 of my PhD, through to the final day (with too many in between to count…). I used it to organize my source material, to write my footnotes, and to create my bibliography.

Step 1: Collecting source information/metadata. From the very beginning of the project, I got into the habit of adding the metadata for every relevant looking source I found to my Zotero library. I used a combination of tools, including manual entry, browser plugin and the magic wand. Having all of my reference information in a single place made it easy to see what I had looked at, what I hadn’t, and easily find any article/book/thesis if I needed to use it again

Step 2: Managing primary material. Zotero is a commonly used tool for dealing with secondary source material (literature). However, many scholars who work with primary material (like historians), find Zotero challenging when working with a wide variety of source types – think, archival material, cases, legislation, newspaper, etc. My approach here was a little different. Because entering source information for complex sources is more time consuming (often done manually), I only entered reference information for primary sources into Zotero when I knew I wanted to reference a source. This saved a great deal of time, while still giving me a complete reference library and ensuring consistency of referencing

Step 3: Cite away! Having a complete Zotero library meant that, while drafting my thesis I didn’t have to confront what others tell me is a challenging issue, namely, should I write my footnotes as I go and risk interrupting my writing flow; or should I leave them incomplete and come back to them, risking losing important reference information. Instead, Zotero created every footnote in my thesis for me – all 1,147 of them. It then created (with a few hours spent on minor style tweaks) my entire bibliography – all 17 pages of it. In doing so, I conservatively estimate that Zotero saved me more than a week of wasted time.

Step 4: Subsequent Publications!! Most people who complete a PhD publish all or part of that work either during, or after their PhD. I was able to publish a tangential article during my candidature and am now working on multiple other outputs. Because all of my references are in Zotero, I don’t have to go back looking for source information, and even more importantly, I can change the referencing style of any part of my writing in less than a minute to comply with the different styles required by journals and publishers – again, time savings measured in weeks, not days!

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