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Academic Writing - Education & CCSC students: Workflow

Resources to support Morling College Counselling, Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care, and Education students to understand and employ the conventions of academic writing appropriate to graduate and post-graduate levels of study.

Workflow for assignments, academic writing, and research

Workflow

Good workflow is critical for efficient and effective study practices.

Good workflow is important for success in completing assignments, conducting literature searches and writing research papers. The best workflow for you will depend on your thinking and memory habits. The list below is one approach. Adapt the list to suit what works for you.

Workflow in a nutshell

Citation tools

EndnoteWeb is a citation tool freely available on the web.

Endnote is a paid application and has more features. EndnoteWeb performs the same essential functions as Endnote but operates within a web browser.

The MS Word Referencing Tool is a feature available in MS Word. 

Bibliography generators

Examples of free online bibliography generators are: 

Figure 1

Screen capture showing PDF text highlighted with the Adobe Acrobat highlighter tool

The text highlight tool in Adobe Acrobat can be used to digitally mark text in journal articles. Save the file before exiting to retain the highlighting.

OCR

OCR= Optical Character Recognition. Most digitised journal articles are in ‘OCR’ format, which means that the words and letters on the page can be selected (i.e. copied and pasted) and Word will recognise the text characters. Many older journals have been digitised by each page being copied as a whole, like a photograph, and the image quality of the text may be too poor for successful translation to OCR format. Endnote searches OCR format only so any attached journal articles in the more primitive non-OCR format will not be included in the search.

Workflow

  1. Analyse the assignment question. Determine the genre. Search for literature using EBSCO; ProQuest; the Morling Library Catalogue; or, Google Scholar.
     
  2. When you locate an article, download the citation for the journal article into Endnote or EndnoteWeb or another citation tool such as the MS Word Referencing Tool, from (a) the Library Catalogue; (b) EBSCO or ProQuest; (c) Google Scholar; or, (d) worldcat.org. Almost always, one of these will have the citation available for download. If not, then type the citation in yourself.
     
  3. If the reference is a full-text journal article, download the PDF file of the article at the same time and attach it to the record of the citation (if the citation tool you are using has this feature).
     
  4. When you download a citation into a citation tool, edit the fields to check that the data is correct. Records downloaded from the Library Catalogue, for example, almost always have ‘pbk’ or ‘hbk’ (paperback/hardback) in the publisher field and this needs to be deleted.
     

  5. Open the PDF file, scan the article and highlight any sections that jump out at you: (a) the key points you want to remember; and (b) any quotes you might want to use. Highlighting can be done electronically in Adobe Acrobat using the highlighter tool (see side box). This makes it very easy to find these sections again. If you prefer, print the article and use highlighter pens. The purpose of highlighting is to keep note-taking to a minimum.

  6. Some citation tools allow you to type notes into a field in the record, e.g. in Endnote, the Research Notes field.
     

  7. If using Endnote or EndnoteWeb, by attaching the PDF file and taking your notes in the Endnote record, you've made the words of the article (Endnote can search OCR PDF files--see side box) and your notes all searchable at the same time. Searchable notes and journal articles are the key to efficient workflow.  Endnote and EndnoteWeb also control the in-text citations and generate the reference list if you install the free Cite while you write plug-in to MS Word on your computer. Ensure the APA 7th edition output style is used to produce accurately formatted references. 
     

  8. If using the MS Word Referencing Tool, highlight text electronically in Adobe Acrobat PDF files and save. Take notes in MS Word so that you can search within these Word documents later. Type your references manually into the Word Referencing Tool, ensuring that the correct style (APA 7th ed.) is selected for the output. For Morling Education students, there is a guide to the MS Word Referencing Tool on Essentials for Education (Moodle).
     
  9. When a PDF has highlights in it, it is very easy to find those places by opening the ‘Page Thumbnails’ navigation pane in Adobe Acrobat.  It allows you to locate information you have highlighted quickly, without scrolling through the whole document page by page.


     
  10. Recap: workflow in a nutshell

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