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Jurisprunedance

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  1. The citation manager software is definitely something I wish I learned more a bout and forced myself to use from the beginning of grad school. I was printing out journal articles and taking notes in classes with pen and paper and after a couple of semesters my "separate stacks of paper against the wall" method of organizing was proving not to be effective. I had played around with Zotero at one point after reading about it on a blog, but I really didn't give it much of a chance and just dismissed it, partly because I didn't want to learn a new software package. I saw a blog post about Mendeley about 2 years ago and decided I was going to force myself to learn the software, which entailed reading through the website and watching videos. Once I started to fully integrate it into my reading, note-taking, and writing, I was floored at how much easier organizing the work was. Additionally, being able to do a software-wide search of both my notes and journal text is incredibly helpful when trying to find that quote you remember reading. Also, if you use your laptop in class and have the articles loaded in Mendeley, you can use the search function to find passages much quicker than other students who are flipping pages of printed articles. The common feedback I hear from others when I mention Mendeley (which is just my preferred citation manager) is that it would take too long to upload and convert everything they already have either in paper form or spread in different folders. This is why using a software package like this from the beginning is especially important. I didn't like taking notes on a digital copy of an article, which is part of why I stuck with the old pen and paper; this was a mistake. After forcing myself to use the software for a couple of weeks I got over my pen and paper bias. I also started using pdf copies of ebooks instead of physical books as they can be read and annotated in Mendeley with the same benefits of the search function. In short, I strongly recommend picking a citation manager from the beginning and taking the time to learn its features.
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