Don’t trust EndNote to do your reference list!

That is this week’s main lesson.

Having updated my research plan, I also needed to update my reference list. Since I’ve finally got most of my papers into EndNote, I thought I could export a Word document of my references and copy-paste the relevant ones into my text. Wrong! To use my son’s phrase, it was totally tweaking out: first names appearing as surnames, publication years that didn’t match the articles, and some very strange formatting. So much for making life easier. I’m glad I decided not to use it for my in-text citations as well. However time-consuming it is, I’ll be sticking to doing my reference list manually.

EndNote is, however, a great place to store everything I’ve been reading, and it makes my library (now over 100 articles) much easier to carry with me. That said, I also keep physical copies of most of what I read, as I find long texts hard to take in on a screen. This causes some ethical discomfort because of the environmental impact of all that paper, so I only print the texts I know I’ll return to again and again, and I mostly buy second-hand books. Yes, I’m justifying myself here.

While on the subject of articles and references, I had a one-to-one meeting with one of the university librarians this week to discuss search strategies for the topics relevant to my research. It made me realise just how much of an art literature searching is. The session was incredibly helpful, especially as it was tailored specifically to what I need.

Afterwards, it was home to do some searching of my own. This was my search bar after the first 45 minutes.

By the end of the day, I could barely make out the individual tabs.

I also had a fascinating online meeting with an international group of researchers about one of the methods I’m hoping to use. I’ve never used it before, but I’m keen to explore it. It always feels like a privilege to talk with researchers whose papers I’ve been reading, and it’s lovely to put faces to names and find they’re so much more than the intelligent writing and theorising on the page. There are real human beings behind the words.

The meeting took place on one of my days working from home. I’m still trying to keep to the schedule of two days at home and three at the office. Now that it’s autumn and there’s less daylight, I’ve been making my workspace as cosy as possible. This usually means lighting candles on my desk and putting on some soft music in the background. I’ve just finished watching Gilmore Girls for the first time (I can’t believe that one escaped me all those years ago), and I’ve found some Gilmore Girls-inspired playlists on YouTube. Just the right mix of cosy autumn and study vibes to keep me focused.

Next week is the autumn break, so with no lectures or meetings to travel in for, I’ll be working from home and tackling the pile of books that has been giving me side-eye for the last few weeks. I’m getting to you, I promise. I’ve also convinced my husband to come along to an interesting-sounding lecture. More on that next week.

Until then, happy reading, and may your reference lists behave better than mine!