 Welcome to this brief video series aimed at helping you improving your referencing workflow. We will cover different aspects of referencing in five videos. First, we will talk about reference managers, and then we will zoom into how to use one particular reference manager that is a free and open source called Zotero. So we'll give a quick overview and a quick getting started with Zotero. Then we're going to have a look at the how Zotero integrates with Word. You can directly edit or documents using Zotero, and how you can have a Zotero workflow with annotations, keeping tracks of notes and reading on different devices. Finally, we'll have a look at some more advanced Zotero features such as synchronizing your reference across devices and collaborating with others. Now, why is this so important? This is because referencing takes up so much of your time when you're doing academic writing, because there is a need for citing the sources of almost everything that you write about. So there's a quotations, paraphrases, direct mentions, all of these things have to be referenced. So most academic writing will have tens or hundreds of references in a document. Of course, the reasons for it are many, and they also have an impact on how we do it. So first, it's important for the perspective of academic integrity, but also simply giving credit for the ideas and for sources of ideas, and finally, helping people who are reading the thing that we write, identify the source of that. That has an impact on what the reference must include, so what should be in there, so author, source, and formatting. That also requires some consistency across different types of documents. So for example, here is two references, and using formatting in two different styles, one of them is the APA in Chicago, two popular styles, and can you spot all the differences between them? And most people would find that difficult, so some of the obvious differences are, for example, some styles prefer that you put just a full stop after the year, some styles prefer to have parentheses around it, and a full stop, some others may not even want the full stop then, some will have an ampersand for multiple authors, some will use the full name, some will use simply the first letter of the first name, but there could be even as tiny differences as in closing the title of a journal article in quotation marks or not, and then as something as petty as having a semicolon or a comma, separating the issue and the pages of a journal. And of course, the complexity doesn't stop there because all different types of academic writing that you need to cite and refer to will have their different formatting rules going all the way from journal articles, monographs, edited volumes, chapters in those volumes, conference papers, reports, articles, websites, and so on and so forth. Here's one example of typical instructions for good referencing. This is one page out of 11 given to students at a program at Oxford University, but I have found instruction manuals as long as 64 pages, so you can see there's a lot involved in getting your references referencing right. But actually, it does not have to be at all a time consuming or painful if you use a reference manager. And that is what we're going to look at in the next video where we'll have a look at what a reference manager does and what are some of the options of reference managers out there from free to paid.