Religion and Theology - Information Competency: Adding references to your thesis

Although necessary, having to add references to your paper is time consuming and it is easy to make mistakes. Not only that, where do you store your gathered references and articles? Managing data gets more complex when the amount of data grows. Thankfully there are several programs that help you to organise your references from literature sources and your gathered articles. Every program has its pros and cons.

Recommended reference software packages are:

• Endnote: Publisher Clarivate. Retail.
• Mendeley: Publisher Elsevier. Free.
• Zotero: Publisher Corporation for digital scholarship. Open source. This package can be added to browsers Firefox and Chrome.

Usually, understanding these programs takes some time. But you do not have to figure out everything yourself. The University Library offers courses in which you learn how to use reference software in the most profitable way. Signing up for these courses is possible through the library website.

VU offers free software for its students, researchers and staff at this site.

VU has restricted access to the site from outside the Netherlands. This can be however, be solved by downloading and using eduUVPN. EduVPN establishes a safe connection to the downloadsite, making it possible to download the software. This could save you much money.

Download eduVPN

Configure eduVPN

In all cases you need to use your VUnet-ID.