A Research Guide for Beginners

Reference management software (citation managers) can help you group your sources all in one place as you do your research.  You can use them to create citations, store PDFs, and/or import them into your papers.

Mendeley and Zotero are free to download, and you can make free cloud accounts up to 2GB (Zotero lets you use less memory for free). All citation managers take some time to learn. Georgia State University has library guides on how to get started on each.

Guide for Mendeley

Guide for Zotero

Concordia also provides access to APA Academic Writer, which is made up of 3 sections:

• Learn – tutorials about APA and how it works.
• References – templates for sources (or ways to pull sources into APA format) and store them for later use. You’ll need to set up a personal ID and password for APA AW to retrieve and store these items.
• Write – templates for writing up certain types of APA-style papers; formatting embedded that helps you pull citations and references easily into your papers from the Reference section.

It will be most useful to you if you spend time learning how APA Academic Writer functions before you get deep into your dissertation process.  To get started, under Learn, click on "Quick Guides" and look at:

Basic Paper Setup (We do not recommend using a "running head" in university papers)  

Reference Elements

Reference List

Reference Work and Entry in a Reference Work Reference

Citing References in Text

Audiovisual Reference

Webpage or Website Reference.

Tutorials cover similar materials but are longer.  Sample papers may be useful for examples.