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EDUCATN 760 Research Guide

Academic Integrity

Academic Integrity is a vital aspect of higher education, scholarly creation and consumption, and McMaster strives to assist students with issues of academic integrity. Check out the Office of Academic Integrity web site for more information.

Be sure to talk to your instructor, TA or librarian when you have questions about plagiarism, citing properly, and other academic integrity issues.

Citation Management Software

Citation management software can help you collect, organize and format citations in your selected style. There are many citation management softwares available, both paid and free, all with different strengths and weaknesses. McMaster Libraries does not support any one software but free popular choices include EndNote Basic, Mendeley and Zotero.

Although citation management software is meant to automate the citation process nevertheless it is a software and it is your responsibility to make sure that the citation is propery formatted and includes all necessary information.

EndNote Basic is a free web-based system for organizing articles and formatting bibliographies in their word processor.
 
Mendeley is a free citation management software system that supports private and public collaborations. Its features include the ability to manage, share, read, annotate, and cite reference papers.
 
Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool that organizes cites and stores references in your library. Your library can be synced with the Zotero website, making your references accessible on the web from multiple locations. 

Citation Analysis & Impact Factor

Citation analysis is the examination of citations in scholarly literature in order to determine the impact of:

  • an individual researcher
    • a measure in academic promotions, tenure, etc.
  • a specific article, book, etc.
    • establish seminal works in a field
  • a particular publication
    • helpful in deciding where to publish your work
  • a university or department
    • plays a role in university rankings

The impact factor, which is based on the citation indexes in the Web of Science and published by Thomson Corporation

  • is a measure of identifying the predominance or lack thereof of specific journals in particular disciplines.
  • is calculated by dividing the number of citations in one particular year to articles published in two previous years within one specific journal by the number of articles published in the same previous two years of the same journal. 
  • can be determined provided the journal is indexed in Web of Science.
  • can assist authors in deciding in what journal within their discipline to publish.
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