Evaluation of Sources: Creating a Digital Artefact

As part of the module PG6004 - Getting Started with Graduate Research and Generic Skills, an assignment was set to locate and evaluate research sources. There are various mechanisms to record sources and the relevance of those sources to one's research.  Some of my colleagues opted for spreadsheets or more traditional note taking. This blog post will guide you through a digital solution and some alternatives. A key requirement is to use a document format which could produce necessary marked up text and output documents formatted correctly. This is a very simple goal but one not easily achieved with a standard word processor. LaTeX was selected as its a typesetting system used for scientific publications and can also be used for other publishing too. As part of this assignment, LaTeX was utilised to prepare the evaluation of sources deliverable. In order to evaluate sources, the first challenge was to identify valid search portals, valid sources, record locations and begin the review. This is not an exhaustive list and please add any suggestions within the comments and the blog post will be edited to include new repositories.

Search Portals

• https://academic.microsoft.com
• https://scholar.google.com/

Citation Formats

• BibTeX 
• Supported by JabRef 

• Research Information Systems - RIS
• Supported by EndNote and others

• XML
  
• MAchine-Readable Cataloging - MARC
•  Supported by Zotero et al

Research Associations and Digital Repositories (Technical)

• Association for Computing Machinery
  http://www.acm.org
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
  http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp

For this assignment, the search portals above were utilised in conjunction with research databases provided by UCC Library Catalogue. On finding a 'research paper of interest', to read, review and cite the document will, in all probability, be available via the UCC Library Catalogue (which is a portal to numerous repositories)

The next important challenge is reference management. JabRef was chosen as a lightweight reference manager and as it supports BibTeX and can be used with a LaTeX editor. TeXstudio is a LaTeX editor which requires a LaTeX distribution. The LaTeX distribution used in this introduction is MikTeX.

Toolchain installation steps (Quick Guide):

1. Install reference manager JabRef
2. Install LaTeX distribution MikTeX
3. Install LaTeX editor TeXstudio
4. Create a sample LaTeX document with TeXstudio
5. Read the guide on LaTeX markup at https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

This is a really useful video on getting started with TeXstudio



The source files produced by TeXstudio .tex and JabRef .bib can be stored within a version control system such as Github or BitBucket.

A LaTeX table generator was utilised to create more complex document tables and which were edited with Sublime Text 3.