FAQs: Endnote, literature reviews, evaluating the articles and journals you find


FAQs:  Endnote, literature reviews, evaluating the articles and journals you find

The following are resources that support the most commonly-asked questions from training sessions this spring. 

Endnote


Unfortunately, not all of the features in Endnote currently work for everyone.   In particular, doing searching within Endnote does not work for most and the features that automatically searches for full-text PDFs of articles is only functional for a few.  However, most should be able to use these instructions:

Cite while you write:

This feature will make it easy to insert references to the papers you have in Endnote into a paper you are writing in Word and to create an automatic bibliography.
I recommend watching the video found below and experiment with the techniques she demonstrates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-h-nLyDw9g

Attaching PDFs to your Endnote citations:

When you’ve saved PDFs somewhere on your laptop, you can attach them to the citation for that paper in Endnote by following the instructions in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmuJaKsR-MM

Literature Reviews


Here is a basic set of instructions on the format of a literature review.  It includes the types of questions or topics you should address:  https://guides.lib.uoguelph.ca/LiteratureReview

There is a more detailed guide at the U of S on how to write many different types of literature reviews.  It focuses on the health sciences but can also be applied to biology and agriculture. https://libguides.usask.ca/reviews

How do I know if a journal or journal article is “good”?


Resources selected for AAFC employees 

These focus on ensuring that researchers do not publish in bogus or predatory journals.  You must be on the AAFC network to access this page.  https://collab.agr.gc.ca/co/kis-sis/SitePages/Publishing%20Support%20Tools.aspx

Predatory Publishers

This guide from the University of Saskatchewan explains what predatory publishers are and provide some tools and guidelines for determining whether or not a journal might be a predatory one.
https://libguides.usask.ca/predatorypublishers

Junk Science

Junk science is the “fake news” of the world of scientific research.  If you search using tools such as Scopus, Web of Science, or Ovid, you are not likely to encounter too much junk science.  However, there is an unfortunate amount of supposed scientific research published on the open web that is bogus.  Sometimes it can be very difficult to distinguish between good quality peer-reviewed journal articles and false scientific reports.
This is an example of a guide for identifying and evaluating junk science (plant science related):
https://libguides.up.edu/bio107fall

Guide for evaluating the overall quality of scientific information (AKA CRAAP test):
https://libguides.cmich.edu/web_research/craap


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