Ideal way to manage large bibliography with PhD thesis

elroy77
I am a month away from handing in my thesis and want to manage my bibliography so that I don't have any problems. Is there a model way of managing bibliographies in large documents?

That is, 1. I want to leave open the possibility that I may want to make changes to either the bibliography or the document 2. I want to be able to make last minute changes without losing the manual changes I have made to the bibliography.

I have around 200 references and 90,000 words. I have seen some advice suggesting to 1. make a copy; 2. unlink citations in the copy; 3. make manual changes directly to the bibliography.

Is there a way to copy the bibliography into a second document so that it remains unlinked and all changes at a certain point are manual? Then you pop it back in when everything else is done?

Thanks

Elroy
  • adamsmith
    The advice you cite is what I would have said. You can copy the bibliography to a different doc, sure, but I am not sure what benefit that has over the above?
  • elroy77
    Hi adamsmith

    thanks for the feedback. After having a good look at the references, I think most of the error with my bibliography is related to incomplete data in Zotero:

    -I have added some books manually
    -some unpublished material and reports have incomplete references
    -not all journal article have complete details

    I downloaded most references using the plug-in from the websites as recommended, but with some it wasn't possible. I have never checked the detail until now. Obviously something that should be done as references are entered.

    I am going to start by ensuring each reference is entered correctly in Zotero. Any edits should then be minor, which I will make into an original (unlinked) document after I have made a copy.

    Is it best to make the edits directly into Zotero rather than through the bibliography edit window that pops up once in the document (as the latter can make future referencing using different styles difficult). Is that right?

    Cheer

    Elroy
  • adamsmith
    .Is it best to make the edits directly into Zotero rather than through the bibliography edit window that pops up once in the document (as the latter can make future referencing using different styles difficult). Is that right?
    Yes, that's exactly right and I would say this is overall the right approach: fix what you can in Zotero and fix the remaining issues in an unlinked copy manually. (You can also use edit bibliography, but I generally stay away from that except to add uncited items to the bib where that's necessary for some reason -- it can cause some strange behaviors)
  • elroy77
    Thanks adamsmith, great advice!
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