I'm being a good student midwife today. I was called off of work (hopefully, it will be for the full shift), and I made myself finish my midwifery paper for my class. My last assignment for this class! WOOHOO!
I took about 2 hours to edit, rewrite, cite, and struggle through APA referencing. I do believe that this paper is finished!
About the APA referencing: hate it. But I'm getting used to it. I use MS Word 2007, which comes with a neat function where you input the info for your references, and it formats it correctly. The problem, however, is I cannot for the life of me get the references to indent automatically in the reference list. I have to go in and hand edit the indentations. It's a pain in the tush to do this, but I have not figured out how to do an auto indent! It's supposed to look like this:
Author, year, title, blah, blah blah
> indented for 2nd and subsequent lines
I've heard that PERRLA works wonders, but isn't quite compatible with MS Word 2007. Something about having to format the document in the older MS Word format (2003? 1997?)
Funny to say this, but at one point, I thought about being an English major.
Buhahahaha!
9 comments:
Congrats on getting it done!
Can't you just select the lines that need a hanging indent, right click on the selection and choose "paragraph" and then in the dialog box that pops up, choose "hanging indent"? That's the way it works in Word 2003, anyway. Maybe it screws up with the auto-references, though. Still, I'd rather manually indent the lines than figure out the correct APA referencing.
-Kathy
Try Endnote - it does the indent thing automatically, as well as automatically downloading your references from things like Web of Science, Scopus etc.
Honey, honey, honey! Take it from your regular reader the Pregnant Librarian that what you want is EasyBib or Landmark Citation Machine! With Easybib you just put in the ISBN or other information AND IT FORMATS IT FOR YOU. For free! If your institution uses a product called RefWorks, it'll do that for you too. Good luck, dear. Your blog keeps me cheerful when I'm apprehensive about delivery - hope this tip is a little repayment.
Thank you everyone for your suggestions - I'm going to definitely check them all out and see which works best!
Anon - lots of luck for a happy birth!
I liked Endnote when I worked in a lab that used it, but it was too expensive for my budget. If you don't want to work with another program, you can make a document template where the hanging indent is already standard. I made one for Word 2003 when I was working on my psych degree, but it's in APA style 4th edition, so it's not good anymore. :(
I thought that style of format was described as an "outdent" since it is opposite to the normal "indent".
Have you tried Noodlebib.com for citing?
It's called a hanging indent. It's an option under "paragraph" in Word. Super easy, just select all your references together, then right click, pick "paragraph" and choose "hanging indent". Make sure you only select the references or else it will change the indent style for the whole document.
I third the EndNote / Reference Manager recommendation. (They're different versions of similar software put out by the same company.)
It can be pricey if you can't get a free copy. My school library has a free download on their website. You can download a trial version, and it lets you use it a certain amount of times. Definitely sufficient to get you through a major paper.
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