• Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Use Zotero

    …jesus-tapdancing-christ-on-a-cracker, batman! How have I never heard of this?! I just pulled up a few videos on Zotero and this shit looks amazing!

    I’m a semester into nursing school, and I know the higher we push that degree up, the more writing - and more strict with citations - the content becomes.

    I’m downloading the shit out of this.

    Thank you so much for making that your title!!

    • shikitohno@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Zotero is awesome, and I’d also recommend the browser extension with an account. Account is free, but it’ll let you save any web sources with all the metadata you need and sync it to the main program.

      Zotero in combination with LaTeX and Biber have saved me so much time. Especially when I had a crazy professor who would make last minute changes to style requirements. I remember we had a paper to write that they initially said “Just cite with whatever format you want, it’s fine as long as they info is there.” Cool, write my ten pages or whatever with footnotes containing short citations and full citations available in the bibliography at the end. The night before the paper was due, “Actually, I need all papers to use APA citations or you’ll be docked points.”. No problem, just change my citation style at the top of my LaTeX doc and tell it to reprocess the paper, all the citations fixed in about 5 seconds, without even needing to learn the ins and outs of APA formatting.

      • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Dude it is blowing my mind how good this software is. This semester has like 30 or so different drugs we need to read up scattered in these weekly worksheets. All the info we plug in needs to be cited. Was the same last semester and those friggin things took FOREVER to finish. This semester… I’ve been doing pretty much nothing but those since my last post. They’re done. For the entire semester… which just started. They’re fucking DONE! All the in-text citations… *poof* there they are! All the full citations at the end of the document… *poof* all there, correctly formatted and in the correct order.

        That was days of work last semester. I just got it all done in 6 hours.

        BRUH!!

    • Omniraptor@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      It’s kinda fucked up that they don’t teach this to freshman college students first thing as part of basic media literacy.

      Same goes for teaching version control such as git to anyone writing or collaborating on complex text (not necessarily even code). https://medium.com/@RichHosek/github-for-writers-an-introduction-8cec9d9ece2

      Granted, Google docs already has built in versioning, but git works better offline and works with any text editor.

    • bitfucker@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      Use zotfile extension (or equivalent since the v7 is not backward compatible) and it’ll save your time managing those pesky pdf too.