First things, first...it is 49 degrees outside! I'm sitting in my La-Z-Boy with a heater at my feet and struggling with EndNote--a program to capture information for research paper bibliographies. A program like this is imperative when doing research and publishing papers, but it is hard to get started. Here's a very simple overview of how the research paper process is supposed to work...After finding a topic to research (that is another story, altogether!), Step 1 is to do a literature search--find out what has already been done and when it was done. Obviously, I only want to do these searches one time, so EndNote is supposed to capture the PDF and all of the information needed to cite the reference. Step 2 is to read all of the related research and take notes. Step 3 is an iterative process of writing, re-writing, submitting to journals and being rejected. And, Step 4 is finally being accepted by a journal and seeing your work in published form.
My research assignment that is due today is to begin the literature search for a potential topic--Demand Response and its Effects on Customers and Utilities. I've really done a lot, but I have nothing to show for it since I haven't figured out how to use EndNote yet. I'll spend the next couple of hours working to have something to hand to my professor.
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We use a combination of open source tools instead of endnote. Since we do our writing in LaTex instead of Word, we keep our references in BibTex format. We have a cool tool called I, Librarian that sits on a server and lets us all share our references. We have a couple hundred papers in there and you can basically form a "desk" from the "library" that fits your current project. It has the PDF and all of the reference info.
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