Writing

The urgent and unimportant easily consumes more time than it should. But 5 strategies can help you say the “no” that your “yes” really needs.

A good reference manager can be an incredibly helpful tool in your research. There are 10 reasons you should seriously consider using Zotero.

You can’t know your research is publishable unless you ship it. But even publishing should involve shipping for feedback.

You can’t know your research is publishable unless you ship it. But even as you ship for distribution, you should still ship for feedback.

You can’t know your research is publishable unless you ship it. But you can improve your odds by shipping it for feedback.

To know if your research is publishable, you need to ship it. But if you’re a student, you also might need to wait before you ship.

Sometimes, it can be hard to know whether your research is actually publishable. There are two steps to find out.

You can have two problems creating purple research. Black or brown research might look purple. Or purple research might look black or brown.

Determining whether research is publishable is essentially the same action as seeing whether a cow is purple.

Faith communities can be perfectly valid audiences for your research. And like any audience, that who will naturally shape your what.

Once you know who your research is for, you can then determine what it means to create publishable research for them.

If you’re a student, your research isn’t just for your professor because your assignment likely imitates something outside your class.

To start cutting through the clamor of the urgent and discern whether something is actually important, you need to ask these 4 questions.

Clearly understanding what you want in your research is important. Still more foundational, though, is grasping who it’s for.

The SBLHS, 2nd ed., defers to IATG, 3rd ed. for abbreviations that SBLHS doesn’t include. Follow these steps to make working with IATG as seamless as possible.

Your research is worth protecting. Nobody will ever have more incentive to keep it safe than you do. So be sure you have a robust backup plan.

A lot goes into writing in biblical studies.1 And any number of tools can help you marshal your research into strong prose. For instance, Logos can give you access to hundreds of shelves’ worth of resources, Zotero can help you manage and cite this literature, and Word can give you a place to craft your arguments. But there’s another application that’s vastly more important than all of these combined. ...

Citation managers like Zotero can simplify how you reference series. But what a citation manager puts out is only as good as what you put into it.

SBL style has a specific way to cite individually paginated articles from electronic journals. But Zotero can handle those citations too.

The sooner something matters, the greater its urgency. The greater the urgency, the more whatever situation will press upon you.

Deciding what gets priority can be tricky. But a classic decision matrix can bring clarity and guide the kinds of actions you take.

If you never make time for your research, your project will go nowhere. But making time starts with deciding when you won’t do research.

Don’t edit Zotero citations to enter locators. Instead, let Zotero manage these locators, what goes around them, and any citation updates.

Zotero can help you keep your citations in order while also clearing your way to focus on the substance of your research and writing.

There are more up-to-date translations of the fathers. But if you do use ANF or NPNF, Zotero can handle SBL style’s special citation format.

Tables of contents can consume much more time than they should. But Word can create tables that automatically update with your document.

Right-to-left text like Hebrew can sometimes cause unexpected results in Zotero citations. But if so, it’s easy to straighten things out.

Sometimes, you work with sources that involve some extra complexity if you’re going to cite them properly.((Header image provided by Zotero via Twitter.)) Rather than making these changes one by one, however, Zotero allows you to make them automatically any time you cite a given source. That way, you only have to work out once how to cite a source once. After that, it’s saved in your library, and you can focus on how you want to discuss that source rather than on how you need to cite it. ...

Different languages and styles have different capitalization conventions. But Zotero can handle all these different requirements for you.

Zotero might or might not be a tool you want to recommend to your students. But it definitely could help simplify their work—and yours.