One of the biggest efforts this semester has been to reduce the amount of paper involved in my teaching.  That has had some mixed results so far.

Keynote and Projecting off the Ipad

1. Keynote does NOT seamlessly open Powerpoint files and project them.  If you have animation, custom fonts or other quirky things in your powerpoint keynote chokes.  There are workarounds, the most important one to me so far being that I used a program to split all my animations into separate slides so that keynote can more easily handle them.  This involves some reviewing and modifying of the presentations on my side.
2. Keynote also screws up some of the size and spacing of text on slides and ends up requiring some massaging to make things look correct.  I kind of expected this, but it still irritated me.
3. Once I made these modifications I was able to project reasonably well off the Ipad.  The major remaining issue is that sometimes there is a delay between when I swipe to go to the next slide and when the screen actually changes.  So far that has been under 8 seconds, so I can mostly talk over it, but it remains less than perfect.

I recently got a Mac Mini and am in the process of getting it set up and files moved over.  I plan to spend some time this weekend moving things into Keynote on the Mac first, then save and move to the Ipad in the hopes of getting rid of the remaining lag.

Entering most assignments into Blackboard

On the one hand I LOVE not having to carry homework or problems or labs back and forth to class.  On the flip side, whenever you put technology into the picture you start to get random problems.  Blackboard is anything but seamless.

• Intermittent issues with blackboard assignments, where for whatever reason it seems that a student has already started work on an assignment but can’t access it.  I have to reset the assignment for the student, which while not difficult can still result in delays.
• Because students are answering the labs but NOT putting in the data, I can’t always tell if a mistake is a misreading or a data entry error.  I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I like to be able to point them in the right direction.
• Online systems require very specific input specifications, and 7.8% is not the same as 7.8 or .78 or 0.78, etc.  I am noting those as I go for correction for next semester, but for now I have to check every problem to look for those kinds of things being marked incorrect when the student got it right but didn’t match the format that the system expected.
• The online homework system (separate from the LMS) has had some timezone issues, and students who waited for the last minute to do their homework have found themselves cut off when they thought they had more time.  Something to be aware of when using hard stop times.

I have yet to test using polleverywhere.com to get in-class answers.  I need to do some planning for that and haven’t yet had the chance.

The first paper isn’t due for a couple more weeks, so it will be a bit longer before I can assess how well grading those online will work.

The biggest advice I can offer on this type of transition is to keep a list of the problems that come up.  Some things (like changing the valid answers to an online question) will have to wait until I set up next semester.  (Blackboard won’t let you change things like that after students have started the assignment.)  My hope is that by next semester I can work out some of the kinks and make teaching with less paper a seamless exercise.

How project management applies to research

Think of yourself as the customer, the project leader as your chair, and the others as your committee and you'll be pretty close...

Your research is a project, or rather a series of projects within a larger program called your research agenda.  The first big project is your dissertation, but nearly every paper, conference presentation and book/chapter after that qualifies.  It therefore pays to learn early some of the basic principles of managing such a project.

Note: I do NOT advise taking formal project management training.  That training is intended for a much more complex environment than most researchers face.  If you end up running a lab somewhere you’ll need to learn those skills (or more likely hire a project manager to do the work for you), but early in your career you will be mostly concerned with yourself and maybe a couple of others.  Full-scale project management is too administration-heavy for that environment.  However there are some principles you can and should borrow.  That’s what I’m going to talk about.

The Triple Constraint

If there is any single project management concept that you should learn, it’s the triple constraint.  It goes like this.

You have three general types of resources at your disposal:

• Time
• Scope
• Money / Costs

You can control the SCOPE of your project.  You do this when you define the research question you are planning to answer.  For this reason, a person introduced me to the concept early on of the LPU: The Least Publishable Unit.  You should choose projects that contain sufficient new ideas to get published, but NOT put all your great ideas into one paper.  When people ask me how I got through my dissertation so quickly I point to this idea.  There were a LOT more questions I could have asked, but I tightly controlled the scope of the project in order to get it done.

Scope ties to TIME.  The bigger the scope, the more time it is likely to take.  And TIME ties to COST, both in terms of additional time at a lower salary to the cost of lost opportunities while you work on the old stuff.

Here’s the thing about the triple constraint.  You can flex one leg of the triangle, but when you do, you need to change the other two accordingly.  The three are still joined at the corners, and something has to give.

A couple of examples:

• My chair announced he was taking a year-long sabbatical in Spain (lucky dog) and that, therefore, I needed to finish before he left.  TIME was constrained.  Therefore I strictly monitored the SCOPE of my project and invested more MONEY by paying people to do certain things for me (like editing and delivering meals) in order for me to get the project done in that time frame.  I kept a tight rein on SCOPE and allowed it to COST more in order to meet the TIME constraint.
• A colleague got to their proposal review and had their committee heap a bunch of additional stuff on to the scope of the project.  (In their defense, she will be writing on this data for a decade and got some great stuff.)  She didn’t have a lot of money to spend, so in her case she cut out everything else in her life to finish the project.  She put in more TIME to make up for the increased SCOPE.

One of the dangers of the triple constraint in academic circles is the COST issue. We tend not to see it clearly.  All too many PhD students take a very long time to finish their dissertations due to massive scopes without any awareness of what that time is costing them.  The tuition cost is easily quantified, but few look at the cost of continuing on as a graduate assistant rather than getting a full-time job. Early career faculty see six years to tenure review as a very long time when, in fact, with academic publishing on a stone-age schedule, it is actually quite short. And this is before we get to what economists call the Opportunity Cost.  What COULD you have been doing/making (now and for the rest of your career) if you were done now?

Scope Creep

One of the biggest pitfalls for academics is Scope Creep.  We ALWAYS have more questions, more ideas, more literature to read, etc.  I got stalled for about a month on my literature review; there were so many interesting things to read, most of which were only peripherally related to  my hypothesis.  Then I almost did it again with methodology books/articles.  It’s in our nature to be curious, but that makes us especially at risk.

You have two protections against scope creep.  First, tightly define your research question for the project at hand and stick to it.  If what you are reading/asking doesn’t apply to that question, set it aside for now.  Second, keep a notebook of ideas to explore and things you want to read.  This is where you place those things not related to your current project but that could lead you in potentially interesting directions in the future.  Plan time between major project to review that material.  Your Nobel Prize may start out in that notebook, so it’s worth going back to regularly.  For more on this topic go back and read my post on Cal Newport’s research framework.

Planning

The first stage of planning is determining which of those constraints represent hard limits.  Think broadly here.  Whether you are heading toward graduation or tenure review, there is always a deadline.  What defines that deadline in terms of graduation might be money (your assistant-ship runs out at the end of year four) or an externally imposed deadline (tenure at year six or your contract doesn’t get renewed).  Regardless, figure out what it is and then back into what your scope needs to be in order to meet your objective.

Once you have that objective defined, you can now lay out how much time and cost will be involved in achieving it, as well as the minimum scope of the projects.  PhDs very rarely do only the minimum, but if you know what that minimum you can be sure to meet it while going above and beyond in your core areas of interest.

I would not advise making up a gantt chart, detailed work breakdown structure or any comparable formal project management tool.  Since much of the work of an academic is solitary or in small groups, using the agile project management ideal of focusing on communication is usually your best bet.  However that is a big huge topic for another day.

If you have questions about managing your research projects and agenda, feel free to leave a comment or ask/follow me on twitter: @protoscholar.

From a pedagogical/andragogical perspective, your course must have some learning objectives.  These may be provided if the course is a standard offering, or you may need to determine what they are.  Regardless, your first step should always be to define what you want your students to come away from the course knowing and.or able to do.  From there you can begin to ask yourself some key questions that will define what the rest of the course will look like.  Questions like:

1. How many students are you going to have in this class?  You can spend a lot more time grading assignments from a class of 10 than from a class of 100.  Discussions flow differently in larger classrooms and you might need to incorporate technology like clickers or Poll Everywhere to make the class interactive.
2. Will the course have a lab or discussion sections?  Large courses often use discussion sections for more interactivity, while labs are designed to be hands on.  Even if you don’t have a separate time, you may find integrating those types of structures into a course useful, assuming it supports your learning objectives.
3. How many courses are you teaching?  Multiple sections of the same courses or all different courses?  Teaching multiple sections of the same course can be easier, in that you will have less to prepare.  However I’ve found my own thinking enhanced by teaching different courses at the same time, resulting in better descriptions and examples for both.  Regardless, you need to plan your time accordingly.
4. Will you have teaching assistants?  TAs are NOT slave labor.  It is part of your job to teach them how to teach.  So while you can ask them to do a lot of the “drudge” work of teaching, such as grading papers and tests, you will need to teach them what to look for and spot check their work throughout the semester.  Plan to spend quite a bit of time overseeing their work and helping them do a good job.
5. Are there materials already created that you can use or will everything need to be created from scratch?  For example most textbooks will come with a slide pack, but the slides are often ugly and don’t explain the material well.  I found for both of my classes that I had to create my own materials that included more multimedia, more visuals and more interactive examples.  Don’t be afraid to search the internet for good ideas on exercises you can use with your students.  (Don’t forget to give the original author credit.)
6. Is there a single book that meets most of your learning objectives?  If not, can you meet the objectives with a couple of less-expensive books?  What about using e-reserves from your library to either supplement or, in the case of grad seminars, replace a textbook?  (Keep in mind what constitutes fair use if you use this approach.  You are usually safe if you are using a single chapter from a particular book for teaching purposes, but you should check with your department and library on whether there are any limitations in place at your institution.)  If you are teaching at a community college, are there open source textbooks that can be used to save the students some money?
7. How may tests do you plan to give?  Undergraduate students prefer more assessment opportunities covering smaller chunks of material, while graduate students prefer a few bigger (deeper) assignments.  How heavily weighted in the course grade will those tests be?  Are they the primary means of assessment or just one of many?  I give 5 tests in my stats class.  I give them on paper and grade them by hand because I am better able to provide feedback to the students that way.  But those tests are worth only 40% of the total class grade.  I have other assignments that make up the rest of the course grade.
8. How many assignments (homework, papers, lab activities) do you plan to give and how will you manage reviewing them?  I have been actively working to reduce this part of my work load.  Homework is done using an online system,  and lab answers will be typed into web-forms rather than handed in on paper.  This lets the computer grade some of the questions and I only have to worry about the short answer questions.  Papers are still manual, but I am working on implementing an electronic feedback process that I’ll detail later this summer.
9. How much lecturing do you plan to do?  How are you going to organize that time, keep the students’ attention and ensure that they are understanding what you said?  I do a lot of lecture in my stats class because the students find the book confusing, but I do it with lots of breaks for questions, partial problem exercises, and bad jokes to find out who is still listening.  I use Powerpoint as a projector operating system by which I put up videos, animations and visual aids to help the students understand the words coming out of my mouth.  Lecturing isn’t necessarily bad, but you do need to plan for it and make it more interactive (see note on clickers and such above).
10. What can you do for yourself in advance that will make your semester easier?  The better you plan out your course, the less stressful your semester will be.  My goal is to have both of my courses completely ready to go by the first day of classes so that I just need to execute during the semester.  So I am organizing all my notes now, testing my iPad with a projector, and otherwise attempting to make sure that there will be no surprises.

In the back of your mind you should always be balancing the techniques used with the amount of time you have available to work on the course.  If you have no TAs and 300 students, you shouldn’t assign multiple papers and may be better off with multiple choice tests*.  If, on the other hand, you have a small graduate seminar you may NEVER give an actual in-class test.  (I’ve actually been asked about one of my assignments because the person doing the syllabus review thought it might take up an awful lot of my time.  It does, but the student learning that comes out of the assignment is sufficient to make it worthwhile.  I compensate by using computer graded homework for much of the day-to-day work.)

One last thing:  remember that it gets easier.  The first semester is always the hardest, as you change, adapt, tweak and otherwise fix up your course.  You will find places you need to add material, other places you need to subtract it.  You will find assignments that just don’t work, and others that work so well you want to further build on them.  This is normal. Just as your students are learning, so are you.  Take it all in stride and keep your sense of humor.

*A multiple choice test doesn’t HAVE to be a cakewalk.  How easy or hard it is depends on the questions asked.  The worst grade I got in graduate school was in a statistics class with 4 tests, 10 multiple choice questions each.  Each question required solving a problem and choosing a response that explained the outcome you got from the problem.  They were by no means trivial problems, and frankly I am a REALLY good test-taker.  However the grade I got (B+, so not actually bad) reflected what I knew and understood quite accurately.  It takes longer to write these kinds of questions, but they can be just as rigorous if well done.

He recently put up a great post that looks at his framework for putting together a coherent research agenda and for supporting that agenda.  My first thought was that I wished I had seen this earlier in my grad student career.  (You know; like before I had graduated.)  My second was that the system could be adopted at ANY point in one’s career, although it might take some time to really get everything into it.

What I like the best about this conceptual system is that it uses a mission statement (which includes the primary area of research) in order to coordinate and direct the work, ensuring that there is a thread of coherency to the work.  My work is a primary example of what happens when you lack that coherency;  I have publications in history of ed, higher ed, charter schools, and looked at a national data set for my dissertation.  I can force them all together if I have to, but it takes some explaining.

The second thing I like about this is that he doesn’t try to suggest that you can go away for months and come back with some type of genius product.  The entire process is iterative and in manageable chunks.  He talks about learning new things in his field (although at a rate of 1 item per week, that must be fairly tightly defined) on a weekly basis, and using that to brainstorm new ideas.  This is something I could easily adopt myself, although my field (possibly due to the presence of numerous think tanks and such) puts out far more than 1 new item per week.

The new ideas need to be timeboxed into testable chunks, and small enough to take under a month, but big enough to be something that could turn into a talk or something on which he can get feedback.  This might be challenging for some social scientists, but could well be possible if you are mining an existing data set.  (All the more reason to ensure that when you take the time to collect data, you go beyond just collecting the minimum.)  Notice that this step isn’t required to be publishable on it’s own; the idea is to use these short projects to create the building blocks of something bigger and to vet the pieces.  I would imagine that some don’t work out and get tossed; if so, limiting the time spent on them is an incredibly important component of long-term success.

Finally the new items are used to support grant applications and papers.  By the time this point is reached, you’ve gotten some feedback on the ideas and have a selection of pieces that can be combined into something bigger.

If I were a full-time academic I would be working to implement this already.  Because I’m not, I have to be a bit more patient about how I implement something like this.  My research agenda is only partially my own.  My day job informs many of  my research questions and, realistically, expects answers to them that are not publishable due to the proprietary data I have access to.

Nonetheless, the approach (if not the speed) is something I am going to try to work in to  my own approach to research.  There is no reason I can’t apply a process like this at any speed, and this approach would be exceptional for a student working on their dissertation.  Yes, they may need to read more than one new thing per week, but the idea of regularly brainstorming small, testable ideas is one that has merit for any researcher.

I got through about half of the class (which ends up being a couple hundred double-sided pages) when it occurred to me that this was ridiculous.  I mean, this is 2011.  I own an Ipad (1st gen).  Why was I printing this stuff out so that I could carry it to class every week so that I would have the slides and notes in front of me when I could just carry the ipad instead? (The room has a computer and projector, but I use the notes section of my slides to hold things like practice problems, solutions, and notes to myself on things I want to make sure I explicitly mention, so I want that information with me and right there during class.

This led to thought two:  what do I need to do to not have to carry huge packages of paper back and forth.  The class involves 2 papers* (turnitin, here we come), 5 test, 1 in-class problem per lecture and 10 labs.  The tests I want on paper; I give students partial credit for the tests if they make a math error but otherwise follow through correctly.  (5 times 0 is ZERO people, not 5).  The in-class problems I want them to do on paper, but those should only be a single sheet per student, so that isn’t overwhelming.  Pedagogically the point of those is to also give them feedback on problems done the same way as the tests, done immediately after learning the material.

That leaves the labs and  I need to brainstorm on that one.  The point of these labs is to teach students to use SPSS to solve statistical problems.  Personally I think this is a waste of their time and mine.  Maybe 5 out of 20 will ever use it again, and most of those will be in the research methods class.  Then they will all forget it until the 1 out of that 5 actually gets to graduate school.  The labs were written by another faculty member and are the most dumb down way to earn a credit hour I have ever seen.  They don’t actually TEACH the tool itself OR anything about statistics.  I’m thinking I may move the answer sheets online and call it good.  I will still have to grade the short answer sections, but can do it much quicker online.

Regardless, I will be documenting this process and the new tools I adopt as I work through moving to a less paper-intensive process for both me and the students.  I will need to integrate this with my entire process, so it will also mean moving the lovely paper to do list onto the ipad and integrating it into my life better.  (Right now I mostly play games and read books on it, which makes it a seriously overpriced ereader or toy.)  My focus for now will be strictly on my teaching work; the day job and the rest of my life is going to be excluded until I get teaching sorted out.  (David Allen is screaming in frustration somewhere…)

* Yes, I assign not one but TWO papers to my stats students.  They have to find an article in the mainstream media that talks about a study, then find the study, then write a paper comparing the two and showing me they understood both the study and how it differs from the media coverage.  Surprising as it sounds, it’s one of their favorite assignments.

What I didn’t realize as I went through these permutations was that the tools needed to manage coursework were different from the tools needed to manage the dissertation.

Even with my project management certification, the dissertation was the biggest SOLO project I have ever executed.  A book is comparable.  Parts of the process can translate – for example it is critical to break the dissertation into sub-parts in order to make it a workable task, which is the same for any project from a course paper to cleaning the bathroom.  But the timeframe and VOLUMES of material you have to keep straight are very different.

During my coursework I could carve my day into pieces and usually cross at least one thing off by the end of a piece. I tried to do something similar with the dissertation and found it didn’t work so well. Admittedly I could “read and take notes on article X” in a chunk of allocated time.  But that didn’t help me integrate article X with articles Y, Z, and A through F on the same topic.  That integration time was much harder to schedule, since sometimes it came easily and other times it didn’t.

In the end, from a productivity perspective, I blocked off chunks of time (ranging from an hour to a day) and then put together a goal list at the start of each session.  Planning those goals in advance didn’t work; I needed to take into account my mood, my level of energy, and most importantly what I had completed the last session.

At the same time certain planning became easier.  I no longer needed to maintain a complex, detailed schedule of my days because I was no longer running from work to class to teaching to homework to somewhere else at top speed.  Class was no longer in the picture, and there really was only one “homework” assignment to be worked.

When you move out of coursework and in to writing your dissertation, you need to revisit your tools and systems.  Accept that the requirements have changed and therefore the system needs to change as well.  For some people, that will mean setting aside a dedicated hour or two per day to work on the dissertation while for others it may be setting aside a day or two per week where you focus on that.  Organizing the other elements of your life around these times will may require a different approach or it may be just a different way of using what you have.  Regardless, taking that step back and revisiting your system will help you make the best use of your time.

Seriously.  After some troubleshooting, it turned out that the raid controller built into my motherboard had committed suicide, making none of my 3 internal drives visible.

Now, a month and a half before graduation (knowing there would be at least one more round of revisions), this should have caused a panic.  It didn’t.  Why?

1. I have copies of all the key dissertation files in dropbox
2. I have copies of my entire Documents folder on the external backup drive, along with my itunes library
3. I have copies of my entire Documents folder backed up using crashplan

I have been going back and forth with my advisor during December, trying to get him to sign off on my changes from the proposal review so that I can finally say that part is done.  One change outstanding.  Of course, it’s not an insignificant change.

In the meantime I submitted the grant proposal.  I should hear in late February.  I also got caught up on all the blogs I like to read, slept in, played with my dogs and watched all the episodes so far of The Walking Dead.  I also cooked and baked a lot, with mixed success.  (Well, everything was edible, but only some of the recipes are going to get made again.)  There was something else big in there, but right now I can’t remember what.  {I remember!  I got the next semester’s stats class set up, which involves moving to an online homework system and therefore took quite a lot of work.  Whew.  I’m too young for senior moments….}

In an effort to provide some value to anyone reading, I stumbled on an interesting blog post about Logistic Regression today.  Since I’m using it in my dissertation, it was important to me but it also provides a good easy to digest explanation, which is not something I had come across before.  If you might need it or just want to know what the heck it is (and how to interpret the SPSS output), take a quick read.  She’s funny.

Back to work with me.  I made the mistake of doing a search for a small fact to add to my lit review at my chair’s request and stumbled on an entire dissertation written in June related to my topic.  *SIGH* now I have to read it.  Meh.  If I can get the revised lit review signed off I can be officially ABD and actually register for the spring semester, AND be at Inbox Zero in my gmail account for the first time in forever.  (I do pretty well at work but have the holiday’s worth of crud to clear out Monday in order to get back to it.)

I was talking to some new students and realized something.  One of the reasons we fail to integrate our school work into our lives is because we really don’t have an idea of how long things are going to take in the first place!

Each of us has a variety of obligations.  Most of us have full time jobs that demand more than 40 hours per week.  Most have spouses, many have kids, and often other family members who demand our attention and energy.  On top of that, most of us have other activities; church, charitable organizations, other hobbies.  All the things that make a life rich and full.

I can’t tell you how to specifically organize your life, but I can tell you how I’ve organized mine in order to tackle the varied obligations I have. I started by spending a week writing down start and stop times for everything I did.  Much like a food journal, it was a pain in the butt.  It looked something like this:

• 7:00am – alarm goes off
• 7:15am – dog sticks wet nose in face…time to ACTUALLY get up
• 7:30am – finish playing with dog and go brush my teeth
• 7:35am – into the shower
• 7:50am – stand in the closet trying to figure out what to wear
• 8:00am – throw a bagel into the toaster, feed the dogs
• 8:20am – into the car, drive to work
• 9:00am – get to work
• 1:00pm – lunch at desk
• 5:30pm – tell myself to get up and go to the gym on the way home
• 6:00pm – leave office.  No really.
• 6:30pm – actually leave the office
• 7:00pm – home, start dinner
• 7:30pm – eat dinner with husband
• 8:00pm – feed dogs, do dishes
• 8:30pm – school work – reading, writing, whatever I need to get done that day
• 10:00pm – watch an hour of tv
• 11:00pm – tell myself to get up, but actually watch the first half of the Daily Show
• 11:15pm – get up, organize stuff for tomorrow morning, play with dogs
• 11:45pm – brush teeth
• 12:00am – go to bed

Your day probably looks nothing at all like this.  For example, I stay at work too late, so I never get to the gym anymore.  If I actually left when I wanted to I could get in a 45 minute workout on the way home (a goal currently).  But I get absorbed by my work and don’t do it.  Of course, when I got home I’d need to take a shower, and I’m not quite sure where that half hour (shower, change, deal with hair, etc) is coming from.

The point is that doing this for a few days can help you get a handle around how long things REALLY take.  One of the biggest errors we all make in time management is underestimating how long things will actually take to do.  I mean heck, a shower should only take 10 minutes, another 5 to throw on clothes and I should be done, right?  But it never works out that way.

Once you have a clear idea of HOW you spend your time now, you can decide whether you want to trim some of the activities out (like overstaying at work instead of going to the gym) and how long things really take.  Then you can set up a plan to do your school work based on a realistic estimate.  That is how I know I can take about an hour and a half per day during the week to work on my school work.  More isn’t going to happen, but less will if I don’t explicitly plan for the time.

Maybe you have kids and need to plan to do your homework between 10 and 11pm after they’ve gone to bed.  Maybe you do shift work and need to split up sleeping?  Whatever your life has thrown you, you won’t get your work done if you don’t plan the time.  But it doesn’t have to be a LOT of time.  A little bit every day is all it takes to make amazing amounts of progress.

One other thing about this approach.  Things change.  Your schedule changes, your responsibilities change, etc.  Plan to re-visit your schedule regularly in order to fix things that aren’t working.  For example, when I teach my Mondays and Wednesday look very different from this schedule.  I leave work at 4:30, drive to campus, teach until 8, drive home, eat a light dinner and collapse on the sofa until bed time.  I have no energy to do school work those two nights a week.  And that’s OK.  There is nothing wrong with planning in some downtime.  As long as you plan in some up-time as well.

I ran into a couple of problems, and since I know that several of you use the software I would appreciate any suggestions.

1. The import from Zotero went relatively smoothly, but it put almost all of the items into the Needs Review folder.  When you click on an item that needs review, it lets you search google scholar and try to update/complete the item.  However there doesn’t appear to be a way to say “just take them as they are”, and google scholar‘s throttling won’t allow for sending all of them at once.  (Nor would you want to; I did a few and what came back was worse than what I had before in some cases.)  Not major but annoying.
2. I have a LOT of citations.  5 years worth of accumulated stuff, totaling several hundred citations.  They weren’t well organized, which I admit is my fault, but I am struggling with figuring out the best way to GET them organized now.  Anyone know if there is a search that will look at titles so that I can grab all the ones on specific topics to put into their own folders?
3. The biggest issue is with the citation generation.  it comes in two parts.
   • First, Mendeley does not appear to have been updated to APA 6th edition yet.  While I realize that it is hard to keep up with all the different formats, that is one of the core ones they support.  It’s important to get it right.
   • Second, I regularly used a Zotero feature to basically create the citation for a single item, copy it to my clipboard and then paste it into something else.  I needed that this weekend to put a citation for some data into my presentation.  When I tried it from Mendeley, the citation was wrong.  Specifically it was missing the title field.  I tried a few and they all had the same problem.  This is a big deal.

The sum results of this little trial are that I’m not sure I can use Mendeley for my dissertation.  Item 3 is a big deal when faced with the evil people who check dissertation formats, and if I have to spend a day cleaning up my library it may not be time I can spare.  My hope is that the folks from Mendeley are working on the APA issues and coming up with better tools for cleaning up existing citation libraries.  I can’t believe I’m the only one to have problems with dirty data being imported.