1. Automatically create citations formatted in a m number of standard citation styles.
2. Save citations for use in current and/or future assignments and other projects
3. Organize citations into folders in order to customize bibliographies by topic or project
4. Add notes and additional metadata to citations
5. Share citations with others
6. Store citations online and access them from multiple devices or locations
The MEE laboratory uses a single online Zotero library to as a central repository for papers. Please send Eric any papers that you believe should be added to this repository.
Create an account on zotero and email Eric your username to be added to the HaverfordMicro group, which is where we store our library. If you want think that an article would be of interest to anyone in the group (presently or in the future), be sure to save the citation and PDF in the group library (instead of your own personal library).
Login: https://www.zotero.org/user/login/
Use of Zotero is not mandatory to use to manage citations of a senior thesis; use whichever software you are most comfortable with.
There is an official Haverford poster template at https://www.haverford.edu/integrated-natural-sciences-center/resources
The easiest way to keep abreast of what’s going on is to set up a PubMed alert. This will automatically email you the results of a pre-defined set of search terms at a time you find convenient, so that you can go through them at your leisure, and each email will contain a new batch of papers (so you don’t have to wonder if you’ve already come across one before!).
Step 1: Sign up
On the PubMed home page (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/), click “Sign In” and then choose “Register for an Account”. Fill in all your details and then click “Register”.
Step 2: Carry out your ideal search
Make sure that you’re signed in to your account (your username should appear in the top right corner of the PubMed home screen). Now carry out a search for all the terms you think you’ll be interested in. This can be as long as you want (it may be worth asking your supervisor if they already have a list that you can copy and paste) and may contain BOOLEAN operators if you wish. PubMed will return a list of hits. Ignore the actual results for now, and click on “Save Search”.
Step 3: Saving Your Search
On the next screen, give your search a name (you can set up more than one regular search if you wish, so naming them something easily identifiable can be useful) and click “Save”.
The next screen will provide you with a list of options for the delivery of your search results (See image below). Basically all you need to do is fill the form in according to your preferences. There are three main areas:
1. How frequently you want your search delivered: you can pick from once a month, once a week or every day.
2. What format you want your search results in: you can choose from “Summary” (the title and authors names only – just like you’d get if you’d done a normal search on PubMed), “Abstract” (summary results with each article’s abstract) or “MEDLINE”, if you want to be able to import a reference into EndNote or Refworks. Note that the “Summary” and “Abstract” options may have “(text)” after them – pick this if you don’t want to receive emails in HTML format.
3. The maximum number of items you want delivered: you can choose from 5 up to 200, and there’s an option to have the email delivered to you even if no new results have turned up since your last search
Finally, click “Save” – and that’s it! Your search is set up and your results should be delivered to your email inbox, ready for you to peruse and pick the ones most relevant to you.
