Thing 7: Reference management software - helpful or hindrance?

As the title suggest, this Thing is about the use of reference management software, and  I'll admit straight away that I've not really used any (other than the basic one integrated into Microsoft Word). Sadly, I don't have permissions on my work laptop to add any reference management software, so here I'll be discussing how I previously have, and currently do, sort out my references...

The basic referencing software  included in Microsoft Word is what I used throughout my undergraduate degree; it enables you at manually input citations, choose a referencing style (e.g. APA, Harvard, IEEE ...)  and then build a bibliography. Creating a reference in this tool isn't so bad when you only have a handful of references, but its a noticeably slow process when you're when you're trying to write a dissertation with a large amount of references. Fairly often, when merging documents (often at the last minute to make the 4pm Monday deadline), the references included in documents can get lost leading to the frustrating warning: "ERROR! Bookmark not defined".

As much as this software is useful, you have to take real care to import your references into a master list before copying text from separate documents. Additionally, there is no option to change the specific format of the in-text references. For example, for the Harvard style, Word uses an in-text format like (Author, year), however when you want to include multiple  references for a single point you have to stack the citations e.g. (Author1, year1) (Author2, year 2) (Author3, year 3), whereas the correct formating for this would be: (Author1, year1; Author2, year 2; Author3, year 3), which allows for only a single pair of parentheses. This may not seem like a major issue, but I'm aware some publishers are very specific on the citation format.

Aside from actually citing works in a document, my current method of organising references is to place them into folders divided by their topics / subtopics. Then rename each file according to the first authors second name, then year the paper was published e.g. (Pimenta-2020.pdf). In tandem with labeling and sorting, I create a literature-review power point for each folder; on each slide are notes from each paper, images and information about the paper / author / journal. Then, when I want to reference a paper in Word, all the paper details are in the same slide as the notes.

I can imagine that at this point you may be thinking 'he really ought to just use Mendeley or another software ' - well I've thought about it, and I understand that a lot of what I do manually can be done much faster in specific referencing software. Currently, I have a manageable amount of references, and the methods I use seem to work, however as I approach thinking about writing my Thesis, I may change my mind.

Thanks again for reading; this week I've attached a picture of a Swallow - it's my favorite bird! Credit to Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash.