[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 420 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Saving Time with a References Manager with Dr. Dana Wanzer.

[00:00:12] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:21] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

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[00:00:48] Bonni: Dr. Dana Linnell Wanzer is an assistant professor of psychology in evaluation and program director for the MS in Applied Psychology program at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where she teaches courses in evaluation, research methods, statistics, and more. Dana is an associate editor of the American Journal of Evaluation, involved in many working groups with the American Evaluation Association, and has an evaluation podcast called EvaluLand. Her research is on promoting and improving the field of practice of evaluation. Her passion is helping folks be more efficient in the work they do so they can have more time to do the things they love. Dana, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:40] Dana Wanzer: Thank you so much for having me. I love listening to the podcast. Glad to be on.

[00:01:44] Bonni: I am glad to have you here too. Before we really dive into the topic for today, I just wanted to share with listeners that it’s actually been six months, I realized, today as I was preparing for our conversation since I had a productivity-themed episode. There’s all kinds of reasons for that, including a pandemic by the way.

[laughter]

[00:02:07] Bonni: Before we even start talking about the reason that we’re here today together, Dana, is I just want to encourage listeners to be gentle with yourself in general but specifically for today’s topic. I also want you considered to be gentle in the sense of I don’t feel like this is going to warrant a whole bunch of note-taking. I will, as always, have a list of show notes. The resources that Dana and I mention will be included in those show notes. Mostly, Dana and I want to talk about some pretty big picture stuff that if we can relax a little bit into just sitting back and enjoying the conversation.

I know some of you walk while you’re listening. Some of you drive while you’re listening, so I hope I can just invite you to sit back, knowing that also at the end, we’ll make some real practical things that, if you’d like to find out more, will be a really good resources for you. Dana, I just, before, again, we start talking about the topic for today, wonder what you might want to share just to frame our conversation and specifically as we revisit a topic related to the broader theme of productivity.

[00:03:17] Dana: I appreciate you given that, “Be gentle with yourself,” with all of this because thinking about productivity, I don’t particularly like that word because the idea of productivity suggests that the goal is to produce more. We are producing so much. As you said, we are still in the midst of the pandemic. I am not capable of producing more at this time. I’m probably still doing too much.

Rather, I really talk more about efficiency because I think the goal isn’t to do more but to be more efficient with what we are currently doing. If I can do my work in a more efficient manner, that means that I am saving myself some time for rest or going out with friends and family or reading a book or whatever it might be, something that I love to do as opposed to the work. The goal isn’t to do more in this case. I would argue most of us do not need to be doing more at this time.

[00:04:13] Bonni: I am going to take that as the nourishment that it is for me, [laughs] Dana. Thank you so much. Before we even have this conversation, I’m just so glad to be connected with you and to have learned about your work and just your generous ways of helping us have more of that ease in our lives. The other last caveat that we’re going to make before we have our real conversation is all of it is real by the way. [laughs]

The main topic for the day is that we’re going to be mentioning a references manager called Zotero, the one that we both use. It could apply to whatever references manager somebody might use but just because it’s the one we both use. Yes, there are reasons why we both have decided that that’s the right references manager for us. We’re not in this episode going to talk about how to select the best references manager. We have just found this particular references manager to be the best one for us for many years now.

[00:05:12] Dana: Agreed, yes. There are many of them out there. I like Zotero for a variety of reasons more than the others. If you come away and decide by the next year or two to start using a reference manager and it doesn’t matter which one, that’s a win in my book. [chuckles]

[00:05:28] Bonni: Yes, absolutely. Speaking of which then, my first official question related to the topic of references managers is, what are some of the reasons that come to your mind that people don’t often realize that they want or even perhaps need a references manager beyond the obvious?

[00:05:48] Dana: I can imagine a lot of folks weren’t taught it in graduate school for one that their advisors did it the old-school way of handwriting them and had their own, maybe, an Excel document with their references all listed there, or once you get really enmeshed in a particular literature base, you start to remember those citations more. At that point, it’s like, “Well, why do I need a reference manager?”

I think regardless, it’s just such a huge time-saver because, now, you’re not relying on your memory. You’re not having to go find that reference. You’re not going to have to write that reference out in the bibliography or reference section at the end. This has come up for me a lot. You’re not going to have to learn a new citation style as in-depth as you would otherwise. I have one story where I’m an evaluator. I often work with researchers in a variety of different fields.

In this case, I was working with some computer science educators. They have a particular reference style that is nowhere near APA style, which is what I was trained and raised on and what I use on a regular basis. It was completely different. All I had to do was just change in Zotero and just say, “Use this reference style.” I didn’t have to learn it. I didn’t have to figure it out. I just said, “Use this reference style.” I just did a quick perusal and just double-checked like, “Is this correct?”

I didn’t have to learn it. Then we submitted it and we had no editorial feedback on the reference style, which was great. I didn’t have to learn that thing that was nowhere near what I was ever going to have to do again. It just saves a lot of time in the long run to have one. If you’re going to be writing scholarly literature, which is going to require references, then I think everybody should have some sort of reference management system.

[00:07:38] Bonni: I think about this so much because people often have what I would consider to be a logical error in thinking that the problem is that I don’t know how to use whatever this tool is. Pick a tool and it’s like the problem is I don’t know where to click on this particular tool. I often think that our problems, including me, by the way, is twofold. One is that our imagination isn’t big enough for what’s possible and that the limiting factor is the imagination, not the actual, “Where do I click? What buttons do I press to produce a certain result?”

The second half of that would be if my imagination could be big enough, which I don’t think it ever is, but then the sort of how would I go about this in general as opposed to the problem is rarely the clicks because [chuckles], for example, if I knew what to use a search engine for, if I know the words to type into search, my gosh, we can find almost anything. Sometimes some of these more overarching concepts that once we glean those and our imagination has been expanded, then the rest of the navigation of any adoption of a tool comes into it.

The reason I bring that up, Dana, is that you talked about that folks weren’t taught it in graduate school. Sometimes that begins to then perpetuate itself where that same lack of imagination we might have as individuals becomes a collective lack of imagination of what references tools can do. I think, mostly, we’re going to be talking today, I think about individual use of references manager.

As someone who’s used it then with colleagues and collaborators, my gosh, just the other day, I went back to something we had been working on some strategic planning, writing that we did, I don’t know, a year or two ago. Then that same body is still sitting there and then like, “Oh, wait. I know that. I know there’s a whole bunch of articles that we collected at that time.” Then the ease with which it could be brought anew into a new project, a new idea, a new set of collaborators really, really blows my mind.

I wanted to share one other thing real quick too. I had a friend who was earning her doctorate. She was told by the people at her university that in order to produce the kind of formatting that she wanted to produce, as in Roman numerals for the first portion of the document and then regular numbers for the other parts of the document, she had to have separate Word documents for every– [laughs]

[00:10:09] Dana: Oh, gosh.

[00:10:11] Bonni: It’s one of those things where you were reminding me, Dana, as you’re talking about some of these things, my gosh, if we can just wrap our heads around how easy it can be once we know this stuff, you would never go back. I literally can’t think of any instance in which someone would say, “You know what? I’d rather write a hundred-page document and keep it all manual and then update my references list every single time something changed,” or like you said, a different citation style was warranted.

[00:10:41] Dana: I could not imagine writing my dissertation without a reference management, right? I got comments from my reviewers a couple of times because I think I recall having five different Johnsons in my paper. When you have people with the same last name, there’s changes that you have to make, right? You incorporate the initials of their first names on some cases, but not others.

I didn’t have to remember any of that because Zotero just did it automatically for me, which I just find that so incredibly helpful. I think one of the reasons why I like this type of stuff and being more efficient is it clears up my cognitive load to focus on the thing that I need to really focus on, which is writing the manuscript, right? That’s where Dana comes in. That’s where I am needed.

I am not needed to fill out the references, right? I think that’s also why sometimes you see– I was fortunate not to be in labs like this, but I’ve heard of people working in labs where their job was go find the references for the citations that somebody had written in or to do that last step for somebody, or they’re writing their own paper, and now the last thing is now go spend a couple of hours and fix your reference list.

Why do that? Because you could avoid all of that if you just all used a reference manager. I like that point about this doesn’t have to just be an individual thing. The group library features really helps make this more of a collective effort in managing literature bases and working together on manuscripts and so on. I really appreciate thinking about it more holistically like that.

It doesn’t have to be just something that helps you, but it can help others. I’m working with some colleagues who just put together a group library for a very niche little field that we’re going to eventually share with the world. It’s just nice that we can do that work and pull it together as a group and share with others. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.

[00:12:42] Bonni: You said that you couldn’t imagine writing a dissertation without a references manager. I can, Dana, because I did.

[00:12:49] Dana: Sorry.

[laughter]

[00:12:50] Bonni: No, but when I think back to all that was lost– I love what you said about, “That’s where Dana comes in,” because it just doesn’t make sense for us to be spending that amount of time when that can all be front-loaded for us and completely taken off to free us up for the other more meaningful aspects of whatever it is we’re embarking on.

Let’s talk about some of the other ways that good references managers save people time. I’ll start and then I want to hear from you. I’m going to start, by the way, because it is a fun thing to remind us that it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been using a tool. A good one will constantly delight you with what else it can do. I have been using Zotero forever. I’m working with doctoral students and would regularly help get them up to speed on it and use it.

I can still vividly remember sitting down with this woman. A lot of times, Dana, when I teach people Zotero, the really sad thing is they don’t realize how close they are to the finish line and so they’ll give up. I had to learn. I made a little checklist and everything. For example, “Make sure that you have turned on the thing to sync your local Zotero with the one that’s online,” because that was literally where people would be that close and then just give up, “I can’t get this thing to work for me, so it’ll never work,” or whatever.

Anyway, I remember sitting next to this woman and I’m explaining to her how cool this is, and then, “Now, you can add another reference. Let’s add another citation. Isn’t this cool? It figures out where the commas should go and where the year should go. Isn’t this amazing?” She’s like, “Wow, this is unbelievable.” Then I said, “Then watch this. Let’s go down to the end of your document. You have your list of references, remember? It’s going to go through. It’s already gone through, but now we’re going to need to right-click in your references and tell it to update the citations.”

We go there and I’m like, “Okay, and then we’re going to right-click.” Then I realized, “Wait a second. We together had just cited something up here, page 2, whatever it is. Why is it here? Why is it in the list of references?” Dana, you already know. It’s because Zotero doesn’t need us to right-click and tell it to update the list of references. Anytime you cite something, assuming you have already put in a list of references, it’s continually updating it.

“Oh, she’s not using that one anymore, so let’s take it out.” “Oh, she just added a new one. Let’s put it in.” Even if you haven’t done that, by the way, then you can have the impressive thing of insert an entire bibliography and it will go through and grab every little citation and get all those commas in the right place. Unbelievably cool. Now, I’m going to stop talking because I want to hear from you other ways that good reference managers can save us time.

[00:15:44] Dana: If it doesn’t do that, it has a refresh button, right? I’ll just say that because I didn’t know it’s actually automatically updating every time. Maybe because I think you’re a Mac user. I wonder if the Mac version is slightly different.

[00:15:54] Bonni: Maybe that is.

[00:15:56] Dana: I feel like I have to use the refresh button, but it’s a click of a button. Who cares, right?

[00:16:00] Bonni: A click of a button, yes, absolutely.

[00:16:04] Dana: I think one of my favorite features of a reference manager is it organizes all of my references. It’s not just sitting in my OneDrive or my Dropbox folder and a bunch of folders and stuff. That can be helpful. Because of the search features that Zotero has, I can easily find all of my references and it helps me start off a new literature search. I already have some processes in place to stay up to date with the literature base in my particular field.

When I’m embarking on a new study, then I can go into my Zotero, use the search feature, and I already got a starting point of my literature for my lit review, my introduction, whatever it is. The search features are really nice. The organizational tools are really nice. It’s the writing where I think it really shines in terms of our workflows when it comes to writing of– The quick-add feature in Zotero when you’re in Microsoft Word, it’s now in Google Docs too.

If you’re writing collaboratively on documents like that, you can all work together in that type of environment. It can also work in RStudio. One of my last manuscripts, I actually wrote entirely in RStudio, in R Markdown, and with Zotero as my reference manager. You can use it in a lot of different platforms and you can easily edit those citations and update your reference list. It takes out a lot of that time that would have been spent with making sure things are spelled right.

I think back to all of the students that I advise for theses and stuff. One of the big things that I’m constantly on is your spelling is changing throughout your document. That’s not a big deal, except I know that the graduate school is going to come back and say, “You need to fix your reference list.” All of this could have been avoided had they just set up the references correctly in Zotero and then use Zotero in their writing process.

I’m not going to tell them they have to use a reference manager if they don’t want to, but it becomes something that– I’m harping on them like, “You got to fix the spelling here. The year here doesn’t match the year in your reference list,” or “Your references aren’t in APA style. Remember, you have to italicize the journal name,” all that type of stuff. You can forget about all of that because, now, it’s going to fix all of that for you.

[00:18:30] Bonni: We both have mentioned the ease with which bibliographies can be created, the ease with which things can be cited, the ease with which we can change from one citation style to the next. I think you hinted even at the ability to just create your own custom type of sourcing and/or creating that list if they’ve got a special type of way that they want things noted.

That is very, very easy to be able to do and then, by the way, share with others too, so all kinds of things. One thing that we didn’t talk about, I’d love to have you share a little bit about, is you mentioned quick-add inside of Microsoft Word. What about just quickly being able to browse things and get stuff into Zotero? How easy that that is to do?

[00:19:14] Dana: There’s a variety of ways you can do that. Two of my favorite features is, one, you can just drag and drop, right? If you’re downloading articles– I usually just download to my downloads folder. I can just take those files and just drag them into Zotero and it will automatically create Zotero items. If it can retrieve the metadata for those PDFs, it will do so and turn them into items of the appropriate nature.

It’ll say, “This is the journal article. Here’s the title, authors, journal information,” all that stuff. It can do all of that. That’s one of my favorite features, just the drag-and-drop. The other is the browser add-on that is available through– I know Chrome has it, I believe Firefox, and I think Safari might have it as well. You can add that. When you’re searching for articles, you can click the little button in your browser.

It will automatically add that to Zotero. Because you’re in the journal article’s face itself, the metadata tends to be a bit better because it can pull directly from the website as opposed to just the PDF because it’s on the onus of the journal to make sure the PDF metadata is correct. It’s not always there and not particularly always there in your particular citation style. It can do that. I also really like the browser connector because it has a proxy feature.

One of my favorite features is that I can add my university library information, my proxy library information, so that if I don’t have access to that article, I can refresh the page, going through my university library proxy first. If my university library has access to that, then it will give me access to download that article automatically. I really like that proxy built-in feature. That being said, there are other proxy browser connectors that you can get as well outside of the Zotero one, but that is one feature that I particularly like.

[00:21:13] Bonni: As somebody who uses the Safari browser, I can tell you that the browser add-on is there. I’m fairly sure that the browser connector is not there or doesn’t work. You had actually mentioned that the issue is really with Safari with how it’s built, and not that Zotero wouldn’t want to and that that’s planned in the future, but that’s the only thing. I’m super intrigued by this idea of the proxy because I can only imagine how much time that would save too. That was one that really piqued my interest when you shared about that.

[00:21:42] Dana: I use that on a very regular basis. What’s nice is it usually can recognize, “Oh, you’re on a journal. Would you like to proxy?” It’ll give you a little toolbar. I can just refresh the page and I don’t even have to click anything. It’ll automatically do that. I’ve never felt like I’ve had to go to my university library website itself in order to find journal articles or any type of web-based content, which really just, again, saves time in the long run because all of those steps just takes time.

If you’re doing that on a daily or even just weekly basis, if you can take those steps away and just focus on get the article that you are on right now, in the long run, it’s just going to just add up to time saved. Just like thinking about those and I use those text expander snippets now. I really appreciate all those comments and suggestions from folks over the years to use text expander. It’ll give you that like, “You have saved two hours in snippets due to using your snippets.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s two hours? I can now be spending reading a book instead of trying to type something out to somebody.”

[00:22:49] Bonni: Yes, I love that so much. In case anybody’s not familiar, the proxy is just allowing for the system to know that Dana belongs to a library that’s already paid for these journal articles. That’s what those proxy features let us do. I was going to mention too just for people. You get used to where a good place to look up books are. WorldCat is one of the places that I’ll go to, worldcat.org. I will put this in the show notes by the way. Remember, you’re being gentle with yourself right now.

You’re just getting the overall concept and then you’ll have lots of links you can click on in the show notes. I found that WorldCat is more likely to have included the metadata versus other places that I may go search. Once I find a book that I’m looking for there or other type of media that WorldCat would hold, living right there inside of my web browser is a little button and I just push it. By default, it’s going to go to whatever library I have selected inside of our folder if you will. “Collection,” I think they’re called in Zotero.

By default, it’ll go to that one. If it was going to the wrong place because, “Wait, I’m working on another project,” I could just easily switch it at that time. I know, Dana, this is a huge thing. This is the time though to just, “Quick, just go make double-check.” Did it get the year? Did it get the page number if there is a page number I need to be referencing? That is the moment while you’re capturing it [laughs] to double-check the metadata. I don’t know, Dana. Do you know anybody who doesn’t do that and later on goes and cleans it up because that just seems like speaking of-

[00:24:22] Dana: Oh, me.

[00:24:23] Bonni: -saving yourself time? Oh, do you do that?

[00:24:23] Dana: I do that.

[laughter]

[00:24:26] Dana: I usually don’t worry about it until I’m using it in a manuscript. I do have a step in my manuscript-writing process because I have a process in place where I am just reading a lot of stuff, and just I automatically put it into Zotero. I know at least half the stuff, probably closer to like 80%, 90% of it, I’m never going to use at least in terms of using it in a writing piece as a citation. I’m using it to get ideas and learn about my field. Unless I’m writing something on that particular topic, I might not need it in that case.

I don’t worry about that as much. When I get into my writing phase, when I start noticing errors, I do have a process where I just quickly peruse all the stuff and then I edit them in Zotero, so that if I’m using it in the future, I won’t have that problem again moving forward. I’ve got thousands of stuff in my Zotero. When I’m in finding-the-literature phase, I don’t want to also be in edit-the-citation phase. I try to separate those phases out in my particular work style.

[00:25:30] Bonni: That is such an important distinction. Let me clarify for people listening if this is a new idea to you. The difference between how Dana and I just described it, I was implying, although I wasn’t explicit, that you’re actually knowing you’re going to cite that. If you’re for sure going to cite something, of course, it would make sense to capture it while you’re sitting on that page.

The distinction that Dana just made, she really has opened up my ideas to want to have more of that serendipitous kind of flavor going in my Zotero because it’s so easy to click, click. Let’s say that I did click on the browser button, I saved something to Zotero, and then I find out later like, “Oh, actually, I did want to use that,” there’s a link inside of Zotero to get back to where I was.

It’s not like that labor-intensive to go back and grab what other additional information that was needed. Yes, you’ve inspired me so much to be thinking about there are the types of feeds that we can subscribe to in our disciplines, in our specific– You mentioned the niche areas that you research and such, such that we’re just allowing our minds to be expanded with what’s going on. Then why not put that in Zotero?

Relatively speaking, these are teeny-tiny, little data points of things to save that may be useful to us at some point, at which point then we can go and make sure that that metadata is appearing the way that will make sense for us to when we hone in to the writing to just be able to seamlessly be writing and not have to try to go backtrack on those things. That’s such a helpful distinction. Dana, we have both talked about our love for Zotero. I don’t think you use the word “love.” I’m projecting. I don’t know. [laughs]

[00:27:10] Dana: I love it. I love Zotero. [chuckles]

[00:27:13] Bonni: I would love to give you a moment to talk about why you love Zotero specifically.

[00:27:18] Dana: I never thought about it at the beginning when I was early in grad school. Basically, it was between two options. Half my grad school went one way and half went the other way. Nobody really thought either way about it. These days, I am very much in favor of using Zotero for a variety of reasons. I can better clarify why I use Zotero specifically.

For one, it’s free. You don’t have to pay anything for it. The only payment that you might end up using is if you want to pay for the storage, but there are ways to bypass that. I just think that as a way to promote Zotero personally by paying a, quite frankly, fairly nominal fee for storage of all my journal articles. More importantly, it’s open-source, meaning that this won’t change, that they’re very open and transparent about the work that they’re doing.

There’s a lot of people who are contributing to making Zotero better on a regular basis through plugins, through editing the Zotero app itself. It’s just gotten so much better over the years. I don’t quite remember how it functioned in 2013 when I was just getting started using it. These days, version 6.0 just came out and it’s incredible. It has this new built-in PDF reader. We’re talking about the editing-the-citation thing.

It makes it so easy because, now, I can have the PDF next to the information, the metadata about the article. I can just edit that really quickly. Before, you’d have to open it up in your PDF reader, get them side by side so that you could really edit things appropriately, or just go back and forth in Windows. It was a pain. It’s so much easier now. There’s a new note editor.

Just reading and editing and making notes. All that stuff in Zotero is just so much more seamless. I just really appreciate using Zotero. Also, it works in Google Docs now, which has just been also a game-changer. I write a lot with people collaboratively, and writing collaboratively in Google Docs is great. Then to be able to add Zotero onto that has been so helpful.

[00:29:20] Bonni: I did update to 6.0 and also downloaded the app because there’s now a tablet. You can have the app on your tablet, et cetera, but I haven’t had a chance to really play yet or any kind of a major intensive writing project where it made sense for me to dig in. You just talking about it gets me so excited because I have that certainly for me. I can recall really having to rely a lot on the note feature because it wasn’t worth it to me to try to annotate the PDF and trying to have workarounds for that. I know that there’s so much promise and so much possibility there. I cannot wait to go explore. You’re just getting me all giddy about it again. [laughs]

[00:29:57] Dana: I’m curious how you like the iOS app because there are Android apps as well. They are third-party softwares. I haven’t heard great things about them. I haven’t explored them, I will say. I heard they don’t do very well with people with large libraries like I have and so I’m a little hesitant to do that. I also don’t know if I want Zotero on my phone necessarily.

Also, I definitely don’t need it on my tablet. I use another app. Not app, but plugin from Zotero called ZotFile. “ZoteFile,” I don’t know how you pronounce it. I call it ZotFile. One of the features it has is that it can sync files with your tablet through the Dropbox folder or something like that. I use that instead of having the Zotero app. I’m really curious to hear how the iOS app works for you.

[00:30:40] Bonni: I’m going to disappoint you and any listener that was interested to say, “I installed it,” that was the end of that story. [laughs]

[00:30:47] Dana: In the future.

[00:30:48] Bonni: In the future. I’m laughing so hard about your pronunciation because I used to work for the University of California Irvine that has the mascot, the Anteaters. Their mail app, at least back in the day, used to be called ZotMail because zot is the made-up noise that anteaters make. I’m guessing they don’t literally make that noise if I encountered them in the wild, but that zot is what their anteater– That’s the symbol for that, so ZotMail, out all these things. I just assumed it was ZotFile, but the reference I’m realizing was to the UCI Anteaters, not to Zotero. [laughs]

[00:31:24] Dana: Right, because it’s Zotero, so you think it’s ZoteFile, but that just sounds funny. I have no idea.

[00:31:28] Bonni: It sounds weird. We’re going to call it ZotFile.

[crosstalk]

[00:31:29] Dana: You can call it ZotFile or what’s the common. [chuckles]

[00:31:32] Bonni: If they haven’t called it that, we will rebrand it for them to help them. Yes, I like that. What are some of the things that we haven’t already mentioned that are mistakes that people commonly make, or habits we should really instill to get the most out of a references manager?

[00:31:49] Dana: I think the big thing to remember is it’s not perfect. I think a lot of people come into using a reference manager, and this is not unique to Zotero at all. They come in and think, “Okay, I’ve imported my library, I have all my references there, I’m going to put them in my Word document, and I’m done.” There is some editing that you’re going to probably have to do. For example, I work with the APA style, the American Psychological Association style.

One of the things in APA style is that the titles of journal articles are in sentence case, meaning that you capitalize the first word of the sentence of the journal article, as well as anything after the colon, or if there’s a period or anything like that, and also your proper nouns, but everything else is going to be lowercase. Now, in Zotero, a lot of the times, and it’s not necessarily a Zotero problem, it’s often a journal problem. The journal or Zotero, they’re going to import it and maybe it’s in all-caps or maybe it’s in title case.

You’re going to have to fix that. Now, Zotero does make it a little bit easier. If you right-click on that field in Zotero, you can change it to sentence case from title case or vice versa if your particular reference style is a title case for the journal articles. It can do that for you, but you’re going to have to do that. It’s not something where it’s going to fix that automatically. Sometimes it doesn’t import data correctly. Sometimes it can’t find the journal information correctly.

Just go in knowing that there will be some editing that you will have to do, but it’s one and done. For each reference, you just have to do it once and then it’s forever fixed moving forward because our references very rarely change over time. Usually, they stay in perpetuity unless there’s a core agenda or something like that. In that case, just keep in mind that there will be some editing, but not to the extent and not to the amount of effort that you would have to do if you were doing this all by hand.

[00:33:49] Bonni: I know that we have both talked about a lot of things that we love about references managers in general and Zotero specifically. Before we get to the recommendations segment, I wonder, is there anything else you want to mention that you really appreciate some advanced things that maybe we haven’t talked about already?

[00:34:07] Dana: Well, we’ve talked about the plugins, and so ZotFile is one of those plugins I really like. There’s a lot of others you can get plugins to find citation counts from Google Scholar or you can have plugins. There’s a new platform called scite, S-C-I-T-E. It has a plugin, so it can give you information about the citation patterns of that particular file and so on. Some of the plugins are really powerful and can really help you in the work that you’re doing.

Another feature that I really like from Zotero is that you can subscribe to journals’ RSS feeds. Now, in Zotero, you could be following your favorite journals and their RSS feeds to automatically add those to your Zotero. I don’t particularly use that feature. I really do like that it is there. I have an email subscription. I have a workflow that works that way. I do appreciate that they really try to make your life easier and there’s a lot of ways to do one single task in Zotero oftentimes.

[00:35:11] Bonni: This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. Rather than go the serendipitous route that I very often go, I’m going all-in on the topic of references managers like we’ve been talking about. One thing I wanted to mention is some videos that are available on YouTube for free from Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody. These are for back on Zotero 4, although both Dana and I don’t think things have changed that much that they wouldn’t still be valuable to you.

If you want to check them out, he’s got a great series on getting started with Zotero 4. He has a whole series, a playlist on Zotero quick tips. Just like Dana was talking about, to me, this just expanded my imagination for even some things that were possible that I didn’t realize from just regular use, so I would suggest that playlist from him. All of this, by the way, in the show notes, one click away for you when you get in there on to the show notes page. Then he also has a series of videos on what is called Markdown.

Markdown, the first time I ever heard about it, sounded kind of scary. [chuckles] Markdown is a way of writing in plain text instead of like we might be used to in Word going and clicking on something and clicking on the letter B to make text bold. There instead is where you can type in something and make it– In this case, it’s a– What is that? That’s a star, but what’s it really called, Dana? That’s not a star.

[00:36:40] Dana: Asterisk.

[00:36:41] Bonni: You can type in an asterisk, type the word, and then another asterisk, and you’re going to have bold show up and all of that. If you look at Markdown writing, it looks super, super plain. I kind of liked that because sometimes you can just see better what’s there, but you can also view it and what it looks like once it actually gets all dressed up and its formatting. I’m not explaining Markdown very well, but Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody does.

I’m going to suggest that you go over there to learn a little bit about Markdown because I have found it to be so helpful to me. Really, I truly can’t think of a writing project for me that doesn’t often start writing in Markdown even if I eventually move it over into another tool. It’s also just a really good set of skills, I think, to have that is applicable across a number of different contexts, including how you might use it in Zotero or in conjunction with Zotero, I should really say.

The last thing I’d like to recommend, and really the biggest thing I’d like to recommend today is a course that Dana has developed called Learn Zotero. That was really how she and I first got connected. I have taken the course and found it just to be– As somebody who’s used it for years, I found it delightful for so many reasons, but two, I’d like to mention, you are so knowledgeable, Dana.

I felt like I was in such good hands. You speak with such a quick pace because you helped me from getting too distracted because it’s like you’re here to give me what I need to know and there’s no superfluous stuff going on. The other thing that I loved about how you did this, and I don’t know if this was intentional or not, you make mistakes. You literally click somewhere and go, “Wait, I’m not sure what happened.”

Normally, that would irritate me because I would think, “Dana, couldn’t you have cleaned this up for the editing?” What it keeps reminding me of is just watching you as you assess. Now, why when I clicked there didn’t that work? You’re actually educating me more about Zotero than if you cleaned up everything along the way. It’s really very difficult to describe to people without them being able to experience it for herself, but it was a very, very unique course format.

I think too many of us in academics think that the goal is to be perfect. Then if we give our learners our perfection, we will be giving them this perfect gift. I actually think that’s not the case. You bring a unique blend of sheer competence. I’m so impressed with what you’ve learned and were able to teach me about Zotero while simultaneously being vulnerable enough to not feel like you had to start over. You taught me so much more because guess what, Dana, I’m going to click on the wrong thing and I’m going to run into the same thing.

Now, I’m going to have the same confidence that you have of, “Ha, I wonder why that happened,” and be able to ask myself some of the questions that you just invite us to ask. Thank you so much for this wonderful course, can’t recommend it enough. I’m going to say one more thing and then pass it over to Dana for her recommendations. This is a paid course. Yes, there are free resources, but this to me is well worth it. I do want to mention that Dana says they’re right there on the page.

If this is an issue for you financially, she invites you to reach out to her and let her know, “Yes, I’m really interested in your course, but this isn’t going to work from a cost-wise,” so I just felt like that was such an inclusive thing for you to do, Dana. Thank you for modeling that for us. I think you should get paid for this course. I think it’s such a generous thing of you to say, “Hey, not everybody may be able to pay what you’re asking for.” I just love that invitation to us. Thank you for much for the course. I’m going to pass it over to you for whatever you’d like to recommend.

[00:40:21] Dana: Well, first, just thank you. I appreciate that other people have modeled. There’s a sliding scale already built into the pay model. That’s already built-in, but one thing I just also want to mention is that I’m there with you in multiple regards. I had one student going through the course who was like, “I’m having this problem.” She emailed me, “I’m having this problem. I don’t know what’s going on.”

We sat down for a quick Zoom call. Got on Zoom real quick and it was a very minor, little thing. I’m available to do that. I think the thing that I’m offering to the course is a more hands-on help through it as opposed to, yes, there are plenty of free resources out there. I took advantage of those learning Zotero all those years ago and they’re so great, but sometimes you run into stumbling blocks that can be really a hurdle to navigate through. I appreciate all your kind thoughts about the course.

[00:41:17] Bonni: I wanted to mention one thing too. I had it in my notes and then forgot to say it. I was thinking the other day as I was taking it. I had a question because it was about the Mac. I couldn’t figure out how to get the Mac extension to work or whatever. I didn’t want to bother you. I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to bother her and ask her.” I laughed so hard because, literally, right there on the page where I have the question, someone else has asked that question on the very page where I have the question too. You answered it and it completely didn’t occur to me.

It’s so funny because sometimes these courses do feel static. I think sometimes people may be locked down the ability to ask questions. There must be a way in your platform to turn that setting on or off. Literally, if you have a question, not only it sounds like we could reach out to you, Dana, but literally right there in the course, you can ask a question, get it answered, and then see what other people’s questions are because that to me is another great way to learn too. I just want to mention that because I put that in my notes how I really liked that format. It was really fun for me to learn that way too.

[00:42:16] Dana: I appreciate that. My recommendations, funny enough, it follows along your Markdown recommendation because it is a platform that can use Markdown language in writing in it. It’s available there. Somebody has recommended it and I think it was many years ago. It was somebody who’s actually– I’m going to recommend him twice because I really love his stuff.

Robert Talbert came on your podcast a long time ago to talk about productivity and was talking about the Getting Things Done system and other things and, with that, recommended Todoist. I had to go back and find out how long I’ve been using this, but I’ve been using it since 2014. I just absolutely love this task management software. If you haven’t already been able to tell, I’m all about efficiency in my work. Todoist is one of the big ways that I feel like I can be most efficient with my work.

I think of it almost as a second brain. Whenever I think of a task, it goes directly into Todoist, so I don’t have to think about it any longer that all my due dates are there. I also use it as a project management software. I tried another big one for a few months. I fully committed to this other project management software for three months and I had to give it up because it was too much. I went back to Todoist and I’m just in love with the platform that, again, just like Zotero, have just done some incredible updates over the years.

If you were previously not sold on the fact that it didn’t have those Kanban types of boards like a Trello board, it has that feature now. It really works with my workflow really well. I definitely recommend if you don’t have a task management software process in place and you like going the digital route. That Todoist is one that you can look into, although I know there are plenty of other good ones out there.

The other recommendation, it’s also from Robert Talbert. I’ve been really, really loving the work he and David Clark are doing in Grading for Growth. They have a newsletter that comes out. I had to go back and go through my bookmarks at some point. I realized what got me into alternative grading systems was an early blog post I had read from him using specifications grading in his calculus course. Now, I don’t teach calculus one bit, but I was reading that blog post.

It was like my first year teaching. I was so enamored by this idea of how to go about teaching all of this stuff and how to grade in a way that focuses on the learning. The Grading for Growth website, gradingforgrowth.com, they’re working on a book, which I just cannot wait to get my hands on. Just as an evaluator, as a teacher, it really aligns with how I think we should be evaluating in assessing our students, and so really appreciate all the resources they’re putting out as well.

[00:45:04] Bonni: Oh, I love it too and absolutely will be excited about putting the link in the recommendations segment for Grading for Growth and also Todoist. Thank you for these two wonderful recommendations, Dana. Just thank you for connecting with me. I’m so excited about the work that you do. Energized by today’s conversation, but probably even more so just the idea of staying connected with what you’re doing and continuing to learn from you. Thank you so much.

[00:45:28] Dana: Thank you so much for having me. I love getting to nerd out over these things.

[00:45:31] Bonni: [chuckles] Me too.

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[00:45:35] Bonni: Thanks once again to Dr. Dana Linnell Wanzer for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak, and was edited by Andrew Kroger. Production support was provided by Sierra Smith. I appreciate you being a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community. If you’d like to get weekly updates where you’ll get all the show notes from the most recent episode along with some other resources and recommendations that don’t show up on the podcast, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

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