Building a Reference Database

Author: Stephen J. Turnbull
Organization: Faculty of Engineering, Information, and Systems at the University of Tsukuba
Contact: Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>
Date: December 26, 2017
Copyright: 2017, Stephen J. Turnbull
topic:document, resources

I recommend building a formal database of references. I use TeX and BibTeX myself. A free system that a colleague recommends highly is called Zotero (he works on a variant specifically for the study of law called Juris-M). Probably the most accessible system if you're not planning to write academic papers for your career is a simple spreadsheet. I suggest one as follows.

  1. Use bibliography.xlsx.

  2. Undergraduate students should aim for at least N=30 entries, masters students for N=50, and doctoral students for N=100. You won't necessarily study them all, and some of those you study will not be appropriate for including in your thesis's bibliography. Record everything because you don't know which ones will be useful until just before submission.

    You should have N/2 entries by the time of your proposal workshop (late May for undergraduates), and you should have studied N/3 by that time.

    Sometimes "study" means reading several times, working out equations, collecting more resources from the paper's bibliography, and going to textbooks for needed background knowledge. If you don't do that for any of your resources, you're probably not making progress. Other times "study" means reading the abstract and deciding this is not relevant, and perhaps skimming the introduction, conclusion, and future research for motivating anecdotes and research questions.

    If you decide not to use an entry in your research, don't delete it! You might change your mind. Instead, add a tag such as "deprecated".

  3. This format has some additional columns for use in tracking your library research that are not used in the bibliography itself. The 3 "general tags" classify the resource as theoretical, empirical, or policy-oriented. You should add at least 3 which relate the papers to the content of your research (the more, the better). These tags are similar to but not entirely the same as "keywords" used in published papers for indexing.

  4. Input whether the tag applies (coded 1) or not (coded 0) for each paper in your list. The counts for your tags at the bottom of the table should be balanced. The proper balance depends on your theme and research methodology.

  5. Fill in all columns accurately, as appropriate. However:

    1. For my convenience, if you downloaded a resource in electronic form, always provide an URL.
    2. Where columns apply only to books or to journal articles, you only need to fill them in when appropriate. Refer to the explanation page in the spreadsheet for guidance. Alternative explanations and format for database in this resource: source-db.xlsx (original ODF version also available).

Whenever you add entries, send your bibliography to me by email.

Work hard!