Why use a citation manager?

There are a wide range of citation managers available that ensure that you use the Bournemouth Harvard style correctly. Zotero is one that is freely available and easily installed on your laptop. It works through the Firefox browser. The purpose of a citation manager is to allow you to concentrate on writing the text of your essay without worrying about making sure the citations are always correctly formatted. That way all the feedback you get will be on the actual text rather than on the format of the references.

Here’s an example of how Zotero works on a laptop.

Download and install Zotero

https://www.zotero.org/

Install the software together with the Firefox connector and the word processor plug in. Follow the instructions for your operating system. This will probably be Windows or Mac, but my screenshots are from my laptop running Linux. I won’t show the installation process, but it is very simple.

Install the Bournemouth Harvard style

Before using the cite as you write feature make sure that you have installed the current Bournemouth Harvard style. This will generate output that should correctly follow all the rules for citing articles and web pages for assignments that are submitted to Bournemouth University. Although this formats your citations automatically you may sometimes need to edit the actual information that is captured by the Firefox connector before citing a web page, as the automatic import can miss some details such as the author’s name.

Search for the Bournemouth Harvard style ..

Then apply it as the default setting.

Citing a web page article

Citing published scientific articles is very straightforward. Just import the details into Zotero from the Web of Science, Google Scholar etc. It is not quite as simple to correctly cite a web page.

Importing web page details

Say you want to cite one of the articles from the Our World in Data site. You should be aware that although these articles have been written by academics they have not been peer reviewed. This means that they are still what is known as “grey” literature and may not necessarily be as reliable as an article in a scientific journal. However they are based on data from reliable sources. They can be used for first year essays. You should however import both the details of the article and the details of the organisation that provided the raw data that the article used. If you process data yourself in order to make your own figures then you should cite the source of the raw data.

To import the details simply go to the web site and click on the Zotero Firefox connector.

That will add the details to your Zotero library.

If you find a journal article through Google scholar Zotero will correctly import all the details with one click.

Citing in a word processor

Before citing the article in your essay you should check whether the author details were correctly captured from the web site. Zotero (and other similar software), can miss these details. If that happens you will have a lot of citations that appear to be anonymous i.e (Anon 2019).

Steps for cite as you write

These are shown as an animated gif below that is playing on a loop.

  1. Open Zotero, check and change the author details if it is necessary.
  2. Click on the citation button shown in the Word or Libre Office menu
  3. Search for the article of website
  4. Press enter to add the citation.
  5. Add a bibliography at the foot of the document. This step is only needed once. The next citation will be added automatically and placed in alphabetical order.

The result

Here is what the citations of the article and the data source will look like. The whole process of capturing the citations and adding them to an essay only takes a few minutes. As more citations are added the reference section is automatically updated and kept in alphabetical order.

(Wolf et al. 2003)

(Ritchie 2019)

(FAOSTAT 2019)

References

FAOSTAT, 2019. FAOSTAT [online]. Available from: http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#home [Accessed 2 Dec 2019].

Ritchie, H., 2019. Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture [online]. Our World in Data. Available from: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [Accessed 2 Dec 2019].

Wolf, J., Bindraban, P. S., Luijten, J. C., and Vleeshouwers, L. M., 2003. Exploratory study on the land area required for global food supply and the potential global production of bioenergy. Agricultural Systems, 76 (3), 841–861.