hey guys welcome to Grad Coach TV. My name is Derek and in this episode we're
going to be talking about referencing in your MBA assignments, in particular what's
the easiest way to get to referencing right every time. This video is in
response to our free MBA Q&A service. Now if you don't already know we offer a
free question and answer service for anything MBA related, from admissions
through to writing up your final MBA dissertation. If you have any questions
pop on over to grad.coach/qa and submit your question. We'll do our best
to answer it. Right let's get on with it. This question comes from a currently
enrolled MBA student and they write "Dear Grad Coach. I constantly struggle getting
my referencing right on a consistent basis. I've tried the reference manager
in Microsoft Word but I still have issues and ultimately end up writing
them out manually, which is a mess and usually ends up incorrect. How do you
recommend I handle referencing for MBA assignments?" Ok, so first things first. I
see this all the time. That is, students writing out their references manually.
This is a downright bad idea because when it is an absolute waste of your
time doing this task manually and - it is so error-prone you're likely to make
mistakes more often than not. So if you take anything away from this video,
let it be that you should not be writing your references up manually. I'll show
you how to do it smarter faster and more reliably now. So what do you do if not
writing out your references manually? The answer is reference management software.
Now there are a few options, one of which is Microsoft words built-in feature. The
one that I'd personally recommend is the software called Zotero. It's free - you can
download it onto Mac or Windows and you can synchronize across multiple devices.
For example your home computer and your work computer. So how does Zotero work?
Well let's have a look on the screen. So the first thing you've got to do is
download the Zotero software. You can get this at zotero.org/download
I'll include the link to that below this video. When you get to this page you'll
see that there's a big link on this side, download Zotero for Windows. If you're
needing to download this onto a Mac, you just scroll down to the bottom of this
page and you'll find a Mac OSX version. So once it's installed you'll have a new
program that looks something like this. The only difference is that you won't have any
folders yet. You can set up your folder structure however you want. You might
want to for example set it up by module. The first thing you want to do is add the
relevant literature to Zotero. Yes you still need to add it once, but it really
is a case of set it and forget it and it's done. You never need to adjust that
reference again. In another video I'll show you how to shortcut this process
somewhat and get your fields Auto populated so that you don't need to
write out the entire reference yourself. Let's go through the exercise of adding
references. The first thing you'll do is click on this little button up here the
plus button and you'll select the type of reference or the top of academic
material research material that you want to include. They have some default items
here, one being a journal article. You can also find a few more when you
select the section down here. For now let's just choose a journal article.
That's most common. So then what will happen is this area will pop up on the
right and you'll be able to populate your journal article details. I'm just
going to nick a journal article from a study guide and let's choose this one
over here, So what we'll include typically is the title. We'll include the author's
We'll include the journal title. Right so
once you've populated it looks something like this. Now you'll notice that there's
a lot of fields here and the question is how much do you need to populate. Well
this depends on the referencing format required by your school. At the very
least you will typically need to include the title, the author, the publication, the
volume, the issue, the pages and the date. There might be some other requirements but
all depends on what the referencing format is, for example Harvard or APA. A
pro tip that I'd recommend is to use this extra field at the bottom to
include some of your own notes about the article as you are unlikely to remember
what each article was about when you just look at the title. So, it makes sense
to go and write just your notes over there. In this article so-and-so
discussed this theory or this framework etc. Right done. So now you'll see the
first reference is loaded up in your window over here.
Obviously this list grows as you go along and depending on how you set up
your folders it can go into the hundreds and thousands even. So it will look
something like this. So now that you've got your reference list sorted out,
naturally you need to go over to Microsoft Word where you'll be creating. You'll write your assignment as usual.
When it comes time to add in a reference you'll
go to this add-ins tab at the top right, you'll click the very first icon which,
says Zotero insert citation and the first time you do this you will be asked
to select your document preferences. Now this is where you would select what the
citation style is for example Harvard or APA. We'll select Harvard for this one and
then you'll get this lovely little red box. The red box is where you enter the
keyword for your actual citation that you wanted to insert. So let's
just say we were searching for something related to trust and we want to select
this first article. We select it, we press ENTER and like that it entered
into the article or into the Word document and it's referenced 100% per
the style. You now obviously carry on and write your entire assignment. The
last thing you need to do is build your formal reference list, so let's go to
this reference list section usually at the end of the document and all you have
to do is enter the title or the heading for the page and again you'll go to add
in and you'll go to the third icon which says insert bibliography. You click this
button and you'll see that it automatically populates it in the format
that you are looking for. It's populated exactly in line with what's required.
You'll notice some items are italicized. All of your journal issue and volume
data is there the pages are there all of this is perfect this is automatically
populated. As you work through your assignment so you never need to revisit
it apart from just to do a once-over. Obviously if you put rubbish into Zotero
in the beginning, if you include spelling errors or something along those
lines they will be pushed out on this side. So that's how simple it is. All you
need to do is download Zotero, input your references and then drop them into
your document as you require. So I hope this video has provided value to you. If
you have any questions of your own, please visit us at grad.coach/qa
Submit your questions and we'll do our best to give you a sound answer. If you
enjoyed the video, please give us a thumbs up and subscribe to our YouTube
channel. You can also visit us on Facebook on LinkedIn and of course the
Grad Coachh blog at grad.coach/blog. I'll link to all the links below
this video. Lastly, if you feel like you could use a helping hand in your MBA
journey, get in touch with us for one-on-one personalized MBA tutoring and
mentoring. Just drop us a line at hello@grad.coach.
Thanks for watching and good luck!