End Note

I have the best research assistant (RA) position ever. Troy, my major professor, is a voracious reader. She reads at the gym, at home, at work. She reads, reads, reads. And she doesn't just read novels or cooking books, no, she reads scholarly journal articles. Her office is full of stacks of these articles.

Well, this fall, she gave me the best RA ever: End Note. End Note is an amazing piece of bibliographic software that allows you to enter in references, notes, full-text documents, key words, etc, for whatever you need to reference. Then, you open word, start typing away, and insert citations when needed. End Note inserts the citation and automatically creates a bibliography. Wow kazow! All the stress caused by citation anxiety when writing a paper instantly disappear! It's simple, easy, and you only ever have to enter the reference once. From then on it's hit and away you go! I loooooove End Note, which brings me back to the best RA ever.

Troy gives me stacks of articles she has labeled with key words (ways to look up an article) penciled on the top. I then take the articles and open up her master End Note library and the library I enter new citations into. Her master library has 12,060 references in it! I double check the master library to make sure articles haven't already been cited. If they have, I put them in the finished pile. If they haven't, I open up a new entry in the Troy library and enter in the new citation. End Note automatically formats it into APA. It's easy peesy and kind of fun!

The best parts about this RA are the following. The first is I get a glimpse at the amazing citations Troy has found, which often give me ideas of articles to read for my own research. But the best part about entering End Note is multi-tasking! I open up iTunes, direct it to "My Daily Phrase: Italian" podcast and plug in to listen Mark explain Italian in his Scottish accent! In Italian, I can now count to 100, ask what time breakfast will be served, and say, "I'm sorry, I only speak a little Italian. Could you speak more slowly?" Amazing! And all the time I am entering in scholarly articles with names like "Reframing ecotage as ecoterrorism: News and the discorse of fear" (Wagner, 2008) or "Evaluating theories of health behavior change: A hierarchy of criteria applied to the transtheoretical model" (Prochaska, Wright, & Velicer, 2008).

And with that, it is time for me to take myself to the world where scholarly documents and Italian intermingle. It's End Note RA time. E tutto per oggi. That's all for today!