 Hi, my name is Ryan Guy and today I'm here to talk to you about some of the tools that you can use to enhance the research process. Over the many years that I've been part of academia, I've been collecting a bunch of different tools that have been useful to my research process, and this lecture is a chance for me to go ahead and share some of those tools with you. So without further ado, let's go ahead and move on forward. So a bit of an overview of where we're headed, I'm going to start by talking to you about the Firefox web browser in terms of being a good browser for conducting research. From there I'll talk about the importance of having a full featured office suit and I'll introduce you to OpenOffice. Moving on from that, I'm going to spend several minutes talking about reference management software, the program Zotero, which is a plugin for the Firefox web browser in particular. After that, I'll talk about doing research paperless and I'll go over a couple different software tools that are available to help with that. And finally, I'll cover a really nifty tool for file backup known as Dropbox. Let's go ahead and get started. Alright, so the first thing I want to talk to you today is a research web browser in the form of Mozilla Firefox. Now I like many of you use a variety of different web browsers. However, today I'm going to try to convince you that when it comes to doing research, it is really handy to have a browser that you use specifically for doing research and I suggest Mozilla Firefox to fill that category. So why Mozilla Firefox? First off, friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer. There was a point in time where many of us early adopters to the Internet all used Internet Explorer. It's what was out there, it's what we had, and many fond memories of watching Hamster dances and other things on the Internet via Internet Explorer. However, since then, things have gotten better and in that, for that reason, I suggest using a more advanced browser such as Mozilla Firefox. A couple of the reasons for that. First off, as I'm going to be covering today, there are a variety of different plugins that are available for the Firefox program that can help in the research process. I'll be going over Zotero in depth and you'll see why that is. Next thing, it's important to have stability. Now while I will say that Internet Explorer has gotten a little bit better in recent years than it used to be, when it comes to having stability, I would say that Firefox is significantly better on that frontier. There's nothing worse than being buried in the research process, finding a really good source, only to have your browser crash right in the midst of it. For that reason, I again recommend Firefox. Finally, like many of the programs that I'm going to be talking to you about today, Firefox is a free program that you can go ahead and download. So let's talk about how you do that. Getting Firefox on your computer is a really easy process. Just go ahead and open whatever web browser you're currently using and navigate to www.firefox.com. When you do, a page that looks like that will come up and just go ahead and click on that green button that says Firefox Free Download and that's going to take you to a site that's specific to your computer and operating system. And from there, just go ahead and download it, follow the prompts. It's a really easy setup and you'll be up and running in no time. All right, moving on. The next thing I want to talk about is the importance of having a fully featured office suit and I'm going to introduce you to openoffice.org. All right, so why open office? It's really important when you're doing heavy duty research that you have a fully functional office suit. Now, many of your computers may have come bundled with a variety of different office type programs. For the most part, those tend to be starter additions or previews. I don't really have anything against the Microsoft office suit. I used it for years and years. I think it's a fine office suit. If you have a full version of office, you're probably fine. However, even though I've used office, I really like openoffice. What openoffice is is an open source alternative to Microsoft office. It's fully featured and has all the functionalities that you expect for Microsoft office, but it's in a free package that you can go ahead and get. So if you're one of those people that's using a starter addition or using works or pages or something like that, I think you're going to find that's insufficient, plus it doesn't allow you to use all the cool tools that I'm going to be talking about next. So you can go ahead and check that out. And if you're kind of a war college student, you want to save a couple hundred bucks, you can go ahead and download openoffice for free. And it'll give you all the features. You can see download from the splash screen. It's got word processors, spreadsheet, presentation, like drawing, database, pretty much anything that exists in Microsoft office. There is an Agiles tool available in openoffice. So you can go ahead and check that out. So how do you get openoffice? The process is pretty simple. Just go ahead and navigate to openoffice.org. And there'll be a variety of different links in the page. The one you want looks like this. And it says, I want to download openoffice.org. Click on that. And then again, it'll take you to a page specific to your computer type and operating system. And you go ahead and download and get it set up. And just follow those prompts. It's a really easy installation process. And you will be up and running. All right, the next thing I want to talk to you about, I'm going to go a little more in depth with. And that is reference management software, specifically in the form of the plugin for Firefox, known as Sotero. So I'll give you a little bit of background on this. I've been in school for a while. And when I was a little freshman just starting off in the research process, we'll say that my methods to conducting research were pretty messy. Early on, what I would do is I'd grab a pad of paper when I was beginning to write a paper. And as I did my research, I would scratch down there. I'd kind of write them all over the place. And I ended up with something I looked a lot like this, which was an utter mess. When it came time to sit down and actually write the paper or try to put together the reference page, well, let's just say things got creative at points. So this wasn't very effective. As I went on with my education, I developed a little bit better process, which was the index card technique. And what this involved was as you did your research process and you came across good sources, you would go ahead and write down their full reference on an index card and keep track of those. And then on the back, you would go ahead and write all the notes you had, page numbers, that kind of thing. So when it came time to sit down and actually write your paper, you had those notes right in front of you. When it came time to do the reference page, you could go ahead and just pull those out and type them up front end and keep track of it. Significantly more organized than just scratching things down on a piece of paper. However, a ton of work. And as a person that's always been kind of the technology, I was a little unhappy with this low tech alternative. So I started to look for something better. Early on in my education, there were a variety of kind of burgeoning online tools, as well as software programs that assisted in the reference management process. For one, the landmark citation machine is something I used a lot. It was a website, go on, you know, enter all of your sources manually one by one and it would go ahead and generate a word document that has your references on it. Kind of the pain in the butt, but spit them out correctly, got the citation right, which was something that I was really happy for. Over the years, a lot of different programs have kind of come and gone. To this day, InNote is a program a lot like Zotero, which I'll be introducing you next. However, my main problem with InNote was that it cost money. And I was a broke college student and wanted something for free. So I kept looking and fortunately for me, I stumbled upon Zotero. So one of the big things that I liked about Zotero was that it was another open source program. For those of you who are not familiar with what open source is, open source programs are software that is developed in a collaborative process by community programmers that have come together and created different steps of code and ultimately are packaged together in free software that is downloaded and available. So what Zotero is, is it's actually emerged as a plugin for the Firefox browser. I'll talk about this in a second, but there are standalone versions in the works that are coming out. But basically what it does is it is a iTunes-like program that will keep track of your references for you as you go through the research process and generate works cited pages for you where it references pages for you when that time comes. However, it does a lot more than that. Since it is a user-friendly iTunes-like user face, you can go ahead and search for your items, put them into collections and keep track of them based on class or paper or other research project. When I first found it, I had been using the research card method or the index card method. So it allows enhancements. You can go ahead and attach notes, images, things like that so it allows for a much richer version of those notes that I was writing in the back of the index cards. And you can go ahead and tag references. So if you're, say, working on a project on Facebook, you could add a Facebook tag. And then any time that you need to look that up, there's a nice little search bar. You can search for that and it'll bring up everything that you've tagged Facebook. Can be really handy when you've done a lot of research and have a really big library. So some of the reasons why Zotero is awesome. As I mentioned before, early on, I was using that Senate citation machine, which was handy to crank out those reference pages. However, you had to type everything in, which was a big pain in the butt. So Zotero has automatic citation imports. So when you're on popular sites like Google Scholar or Epsco Host or a whole variety of other ones, it's just a simple click, boom, and the citation in many cases, the full text PDF are downloaded directly into your library and kept track of. You go ahead, you can set up sync with it. It'll sync across multiple computers. You can take notes. And like I said, it is organized a lot like an iTunes playlist, which makes it really user-friendly and easy to start using, even if you're not super tech savvy. So some of the helpful features that are available inside Zotero. First off is the citation export. Now you may find yourself spread across different disciplines that require different format guides. For one, in the departments that I work in, we require APA formatting, but if you're working on English paper, you may have professors that require MLA. Zotero will spit out whatever format you tell it to, and it's literally got 20 or 30 different formats. So if there's something that you're using, it's in there and it can crank those out directly for you in a really easy way. Like I said before, there are standalone versions in the works. However, I like the version that runs directly in Firefox. It's handy and less buggy and it's tried and tested and been around for a long time. You can save notes in multiple languages. So if you're a non-native English speaker and you want to do your research process and you're native language, you can go ahead and do that. So which language tool becomes super handy. And like I said, when you're doing that automatic citation import, it will go ahead and grab full text PDFs, files. It'll archive websites. One of the problems that came up a lot in my research, my thesis, is that I was looking at a lot of different websites and I'd visit a website one day and be like, wow, this is really great only to come back to the next day to find that it had been taken down or moved. Zotero will go ahead and create snapshots of those sites, archive them and that way anytime that I need to go back and look at it, I could and that made my life a lot easier. All right, the next big thing that is super helpful about Zotero is the integration plugins that it has with your full featured word processing program, specifically that of either Microsoft Office or Open Office. What Zotero can do is there's a plugin you can download that'll connect Zotero to your word processor. So when it comes time to write a paper and you're doing those pesky parenthetical citations is a button that will show up on your screen. You click that button, boom, brings up your Zotero library, you insert the citation, it'll show up on there formatted correctly and when it comes time to create the reference page you click another button, it'll read through your paper, see what you've cited and generate your references page for you. And so you don't have to worry like, did I cite that, did I not cite that? Anything that you cited will be read in and spit out in the format that you specify. So super handy. And when you've done large projects like I have where you've got, you know, hundreds of sources they can save you hours and hours of time and frustration. So how do you use Zotero? As I mentioned, there is a Zotero 3.0 is going to have a standalone version that will work with multiple browsers, specifically that of Chrome and Safari. I believe someone's even hacked it to work with Internet Explorer. I do not recommend that. Remember friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer but what I'm gonna be talking about today is the Firefox plugin. I think that that is the tested and true method and it works really well. So that's what I'm gonna recommend for you guys in the meantime. So set up process is pretty simple. Just go ahead and I'll walk you through it right here. So first thing that you wanna do is hop on your browser and navigate to www.zotero.org. Go ahead and bring that site up. I'm gonna just go ahead and follow along with the video. Once you're on the Zotero website, big red button bringing you to the screen and there's a few different versions out there. Like I said, if you're using Firefox, just go ahead and click on that. It'll download the plugin for you. Then at that point, the screen will pop up, click install now. And then go ahead and restart the Firefox browser. It can take a little bit of time for it to come up depending on how fast your computer is. I find anywhere from five to 30 seconds seems to be about how long it takes for it to come up. Once it's finished, it'll bring it back up and it'll let you know that Zotero is now successfully installed. The next thing that you wanna do is go ahead and install those connectors for your Office Suite. So if you go back to the Zotero homepage download page, where you click that red button you get to, scroll down and there's a link for word processor plugins. Go ahead and click on that link and it'll take you to a page. This page's got all of the plugins for the different types of word processors out there. Just go ahead and select the latest one. If you have Microsoft Word, there's a link up there for that. This demo shows how to do it for open office but the process is basically the same. So select the plugin that matches your platform and your word processor. So here, again, brings up a plugin, click allow, it'll download the plugin. Once that's done, it'll bring up the screen. Just go ahead and install the plugin and then it'll prompt you to restart your browser. Same process before, give Firefox a couple seconds to restart and then just follow these prompts and then it'll get you set up and connected with your word processor. All right, so that's pretty simple process at this point. You'll be able to go ahead and access Zotero and I'm gonna walk you through that process next. The main way that you know that Zotero has been installed is that the Zotero logo will then show up in the bottom right hand corner. All right, so after you've installed you can see that little Zotero logo will show up here in the bottom of your web browser screen. Click on it and it'll bring up your library. Right now this library is empty but I'll go ahead and show you around it a little bit more once we put some things into it. So adding citations to Zotero is a pretty easy process. When you find yourself doing research most of the sites that you go to will have an export option that will allow reference material to be able to import it directly into a program like Zotero. The thing to watch for is up in your address bar you'll see little icons like this whether you're on a library catalog or even like amazon.com it's the little book thing, click those. Documents when you're on an EPSCO host or even newspaper articles if you're searching something like ProQuest or if you're on LAtimes.com. If you go ahead and click those Zotero will automatically import the reference and in many cases the full text PDF into your Zotero library. So I've gone ahead and imported a few in here and you can see how it looks like. Like I mentioned it's very iTunes like where you've got over here your main library you can add sub collections, organize references in those. Over here in the middle you'll see where all of your sources start to build up. You can click on those and then over here on the side the details show up and you can go ahead and edit those details make sure that things appear as you want. Occasionally especially when accessing really old articles you may find that some goofy things happen like the citation imports in all caps you can just right click on it and it'll give you a transform text option and you can change those lower case or go ahead and just manually fix things themselves or if you know you find like a DOI or something that you wanted to add later and you can edit there. Anything that you edit in your Zotero library will automatically be propagated to any documents that you've created in Word and will keep things up to date. So you just change the stuff in Zotero and then it'll spread out to all of your other documents that way. You have the most up to date versions. This is really handy when you find yourself using sources from course to course and paper to paper because if you find more things about those sources you can update them but for the most part when they import in they're pretty much good to go and ready to site. All right, so sources that you can add to Zotero there are a wide variety of sources that you can add to Zotero. I'm not gonna go over them all but pretty much if it exists out there on the web you can go ahead and click on them or put them in through a variety of different means and have access to them. So blog posts, books, VCs, conference papers, encyclopedia articles, laws, interviews, et cetera. Wide, wide variety of things. You can think about it if you can find it and there's a way to site it. Zotero will go ahead and help facilitate that. All right, so moving on. So there are several different ways that you can use Zotero to create a reference page. First off you can go ahead and drag and drop sources so if you've got Zotero open you just click on the source, drag it on over, drop it on any text box and it'll go ahead and spit it out. You can also right click on the source and or hold down the shift or control button, select a bunch of sources, right click and there's an option to create bibliography from selected items. It'll pop a window that looks like this. You select your style guide and you can either copy it to the clipboard or have it spit it out as an RTF or HTML file you can open and put into your word processor. And then the best way to do that is to go ahead and use the built-in word processing plugin that we installed, and that connector back to your word processor and I'll talk to a little bit about how that works now. So I'll just briefly get a quick video here to show you how you can manually create a reference page. So we'll just go ahead and watch this real quick. So as I mentioned, that process is pretty simple. If you don't want to use the connectors you just go ahead and select the sources that you want to use. And like I said, if you hold down the shift or the control button you can select multiple sources at the same time. So I'll see here I'm selecting a few different ones. Go ahead and right click and select the create bibliography from selected items. And there it is, APA. Go ahead and save as RTF file. Just go ahead and rename that and save it. All right, doing some research on Facebook here. So Facebook bibliography. And then at that point, I'll go ahead and click over to that and open that up in my word processor and boom. There's the correctly formatted APA works cited page that I would want to put in a paper on this Facebook research. So that's really all there is to that. All right, so obviously you can do it that way but as I mentioned, the best way to go about it is to use those connectors. I've been using this for years now and I honestly couldn't imagine going back and doing it the old fashioned way. So once you download that plugin and if you use an open office, it'll show right up in your toolbar. If you're using the new version of Microsoft Office, there'll be a separate little tab called add ons. Click that and you'll see a toolbar that looks just like that in there. Toolbar allows you to do a variety of different things. Most commonly this button here on the far left is the insert citation button. Click on that, it'll bring up your library and you can go ahead and insert any source parenthetically into your paper and boom, that'll pop up. I'm going to go back, change, you realize, oh, you know what, two authors talked about this and you need to add multiple sources. Click on that source you've already added, click the edit button, it'll bring it back up, you can modify it. When it becomes time to create your references page, click on this one on a separate page, boom, it'll read through the document and go ahead and create your references page for you. I'm going to go back and edit some of the options about that, here's an edit for that. If you've made some changes in Zotero, fixed capitalization issue or maybe added a geologic identifier, just click this refresh button and it'll go through your document and make sure things are up to par. A little demo of how parenthetical citations work and we'll go ahead and watch that now. So I've got a sample paper that I created here just full of junk text, so I'm just going to take you through the process of adding sources. Obviously, it's surprising what you would do as you go, not once your paper is done, but anyways, I've clicked at the end of a sentence and I want to go ahead and insert a citation, so I clicked that insert citation button. Now at this point, got my library open, select the correct source and boom, went ahead and added it in and I'll go ahead and add a few more, so down here I'm just going to show, like say I was citing something or direct quoting, go ahead and click on that again and insert citation, click on my source. Since I'm direct citing, I'm going to go ahead and put a page number in here where I got that quotation from, theoretically in that text, click okay and that time it did it as if I direct cited, show the page number, which is me doing APA. This time we'll say that Mola Morris is a, go off, go ahead and suppress that author. And boom, that's just as if Mola Morris was a actual author, so you can see you can do that option as well. So here is the process of adding multiple sources in. You can see that I'm choosing a few different sources. Go ahead and add those and you can see all those showed up as if I was adding from multiple authors. And all right, so now once I've done that, I'm going to scroll down to my blank references page and I'm going to head and click the insert bibliography button, third one over and boom, it read through my paper, saw everything that I cited and went ahead and created an APA formatted references page, so it's good to go. As you can see, this process is super easy. If I do decide that I made a mistake, I decided something, I forgot to cite something, I can go ahead and go back, click that edit button, it'll bring up that screen and I can edit the way that it looks, make changes to it or even change the citation if that is something that I decide that I need to do. And then at that point, so here I will automatically update it if I click the refresh button and I can go back down and I can see the changes that I made have already been put into play. All right, so that's the Tarot in a nutshell. Like I mentioned, it's a great program, I recommend you check it out. So the next thing I want to talk to you guys about is doing the research process paperless. Now I have definitely paid my dues, it scares me to think about how many trees and reams of paper I've used over the tenure of being a college student. But something that I switched to a couple of years ago was doing my research process paperless, which means that I no longer print out any of the journal articles or sources that I come across, I have them all online for the most part, even the books that I use tend to scan in and read and annotate them all online. The key thing that doing this successfully is having a good PDF annotation program. I've played around with the different ones that come with either Macs or PCs, primarily Preview or even the Adobe Reader and why they have some of the options. I find that they fall short on some of the tools that I find that I need when doing paperless research. So I'm just gonna go over a couple different programs, one for PC and one for Mac that I find are really well-featured and free that you can use to do paperless research. So just to kind of review why PDF annotation software. Paperless research I think is kind of a smart choice, particularly as you start doing more in-depth research. One of the things that kind of has fallen upon the next generation of students and scholars is expectations are raised. When it was more difficult to access sources and access research, I think that expectations were lower. However, that is no longer the case. With the dawn of the internet and E-libraries and connected libraries, it is now possible to get a huge variety of sources and to get them pretty easily. As a result, the amount of sources that you're gonna see professors require in papers is gonna continue to go up and those expectations are gonna continue to go up. And with that, it becomes more of a burden to try to print out and access everything in a paper format. And I imagine that some of you guys trying to constantly pay for copying or buying ink for your printers is a ridiculous process. So paperless research is a way to knock all that out. So the reason you need a good PDF annotation software is to kind of overcome some of the limits and have a full set of annotation tools. So I'm gonna show you here the one that I use on my PC, which is the PDF exchange program. I've got a quick view of how annotations work. So when I'm doing research, I pull up my journals and I open them in the PDF exchange viewer program, which is a free program that you can download. And as I'm doing my research, there's typewriter tools and so I'll go ahead, just like I would if it was a paper research and I'll type my notes in the margins, jotting ideas down, notes to myself, things to pull up later. Typewriter tool is really handy for that because you can just go ahead and mark them up. As you go, there are a variety of other tools that are available. You can highlight things, just like you would do if you had a highlighter. You can underline, cross things out, change colors. For me, when I was doing my research, things that were interesting that highlighted yellow, if it was a source that I wanted to look up, I usually highlighted blue. Sometimes I would color code different research focuses based on the highlight color and that would help me create a system that works for you and go with it. As I mentioned before, you can go ahead and use that typewriter tool to just jot down the margins, PDF exchange as well as the other program for Mac that I'm gonna talk about. Has sticky note functions. You can just go ahead and stick sticky notes over on the side, take longer notes with those and include formatting, which can make life a little bit easier if you wanna copy and paste things and do a paper later on. And I mean, there's a ton of different things that you can do. You can draw on these, you can create lines. If you directly double click on a highlight, you can add notes to the highlight telling yourself why you highlighted. I might definitely come back to papers years later and looked at source and be like, I have no clue why I highlighted this or why I thought it was important. So adding a note to that can be a useful way. So as I mentioned, draw lines, connect things, mark them up and the great thing is, unlike if you printed it out, you can delete these later on or start with a fresh copy. So that is annotations on PDF in a nutshell. So let's talk about a couple of the different options. So PDF exchange, which I just demoed, there is a paid version and I actually eventually shelled out the, I think, 20 bucks that it was for the paid version just because it had some cool export features and cropping features that I needed for editing and things that I was doing. But free version is what I have on my netbook. It works great and I use that for a long time. So to get that, there wasn't a quick and easy short version. It's hosted on the cnetdownloads.com site. So you can either go to this URL, tiny.cc forward slash 5vc0k or just go to downloads.com and search for PDF exchange viewer and it'll bring it up and then just go ahead and click download now. Super easy installation and you'll be up and ready to go. If you're a Mac user, unfortunately, PDF exchange does not work on a Mac but I have found a program that I use on my Mac that works just as well on the Mac platform and it's a program called skim. It's another one of those open source programs that I've been talking about today. So to get skim, just go ahead and navigate to skim-app.sourceforge.net and that'll bring up a screen. It's got some information on it over on the side. Just look where it says current version. Constantly changing but go ahead and click on that current version, download, follow the prompts, set it up, great program, pretty sure all you have to do is download it, mount the disk image and then drag and drop it to your applications. Boom, installed and you'll be ready to go and all those same annotation features that I just showed you in PDF exchange. It's got the same tools in skim and it'll allow you to conduct that paperless research process. All right, so the last thing that I wanna talk to you about today is file backup software. There is nothing worse than working on a long research process and even being diligent and trying to save stuff ultimately to have a laptop crash, get stolen, something along those lines and lose work. I think when you're really invested in a project even like losing an hour of changes just seems utterly devastating. So one of the great ways to get around that is to have a good file backup tool. Now, I don't care who you are or how diligently you email things to yourself or back up on flash drives. Sooner or later you're gonna forget to do it and you're gonna have data loss. Today I'll talk to you a little bit about Dropbox. Dropbox is an automatic plugin that you can go ahead and download and install on your computer, PC, Mac, Mac or whatever and it will automatically backup anything that you put into it. So how Dropbox works is it creates a folder on your computer usually my Dropbox inside your documents folder and anything that is put into that folder is automatically uploaded to a secure server where all of your files are kept and you can install it on multiple computers and it'll sync across those computers. There's apps for your iPhone, your Android phone, I believe they don't have Blackberry app now and you can access your files anywhere and everywhere. As you're working on stuff and you save a file if you realize that you made a mistake you didn't mean to save it. It allows revisions so you can go back in time and download copies of earlier files. You can share folders. When I was a grad student we created a grad student share folder where we all dropped journal articles and things that we were working on and we were able to share those files inside the share folders inside our Dropboxes with each other and it was really handy. And once again, like everything that I've shown you today, Dropbox is a free program that you can go ahead and download and put on your computer. There is pay options but for free you get two gigabytes and if you invite your friends you get an extra half a gigabyte for every friend that you invite. So definitely get it, invite some friends that combines like 10 gigabytes and it's still free. So check that out. To get Dropbox, super easy process just go ahead and navigate to dropbox.com. On the site you'll see the big blue button that says download Dropbox. Click that button, follow the guide and it'll go ahead and download it onto your computer. It's got a nice easy setup process where you choose where you wanna keep a Dropbox folder. I find all the defaults work. Then there's a nice easy handy tour that will show you all the features and functionalities of that, you can go ahead and check that out and I think they'll be pretty happy with that. Well, I wanna thank you guys today for your time. I, as I said at the beginning of this, been doing this for a long time and there are a lot of different tools out there. These are some of the best ones that I found that have been significantly helpful to me and my work as a scholar, so go ahead and check them out and I wish you good researching.