Another important tool available to the DeVry library is NoodleTools. NoodleTools is an APA citation composer, so if you have questions on how to produce those APA citations, you want to become familiar with NoodleTools.
Once again, from the DeVry University library website, click on Databases and pick NoodleTools. The very first time you go into NoodleTools, you will need to create your own personal ID, so you will need to go to this first button and do that. Afterwards, you can go in and enter that user name and ID right here and proceed straight away. To create your own NoodleTools account, it's just a matter of answering their questions and then creating your own ID, password, and easy login. Once you've done that, you're good to go.
Whether it's the first time you're in NoodleTools or you're going in as a regular user, you'll see a screen like this. And we want to click on Create a New Project. Once you've selected Create a New Project, it's a matter of going through and telling NoodleTools you want to do it in APA, and since you're in college, you want the Advanced version. Now just give it a name and click on that Create Project button.
From the dashboard screen scroll down and, to the left, go ahead and click on References. From here you want to select the dropdown menu and then look at the menu to find the type of item that you're wanting to cite. Some of the more commonly used ones are up top: books, journals, magazines, etc. But as you scroll down, you see there's a number of other things, everything from religious works to reports, finding pieces of art, law, etc. NoodleTools can cite it in APA for you. NoodleTools will also provide you with a brief description of each format that you may be using. If you already know what a journal is, for example, just go ahead and click on Continue.
Regardless of the format that you've selected in NoodleTools, you will get a page that looks very much like this. We picked a journal, this one being from database available in the DeVry University library. It could easily be a journal that's available in print, on a website, or even in microform. We would just click the appropriate tab.
Oftentimes, online sources will have a DOI, a digital objective identifier. This is a unique number; however, it's not available for everything. So if it's not there, don't worry about it; we can keep moving. All of our online resources will have a URL, however. We need to cut and paste that and put it here.
Now we need to add the name of the database. The database name is not going to be EBSCOhost, nor will it be ProQuest. Within each of those vendors, there are a number of specific databases, such as Academic Search Complete, Business Source Complete, or in this case Masterfile Premier. Be sure to include these and not the name of the vendor. Within those databases, each article will have a unique accession number. Go ahead and insert that here.
Now we want to move down to where the authors are. With NoodleTools, you enter the first name first. If there's a middle name, we would add that. If not, we can leave it blank; and then, finally, the last name. If your article has multiple authors, we can add another contributor and then follow the process again – a first name, middle name or middle initial, and last name.
Now we want to enter the title of the article. The title is going to follow APA format. What that means is you will capitalize the first word of the title, the first word of the subtitle, and any proper nouns. Anything else is going to be lower case. Scrolling down the page in NoodleTools, we will now add the title of the journal and then the specific volume number, the issue number, and then the year. If our professor wants us to do an annotated bibliography, we could type our annotation here. If that's not a requirement or something you choose not to do, we can go ahead, leave it blank, and then go down and click Submit.
After we've submitted, we're going to get a page that looks like this. It will include the citations that we've entered plus a couple of very important features, one of which is the in-text reference. This link will give us an example of what an in-text reference citation would look like. In this case it says, "the end of your sentence (Glick and Goldberg, 2003)." And if we're actually quoting from here, there's even an option to include the page number that would be featured below.
Over on the left, there's an option to print. Clicking on this button, we can select Word and now we're ready to create our own list of references – or rather, I should say, letting NoodleTools create our own list of references. NoodleTools just created my list of references in Word. NoodleTools does the hanging indents. NoodleTools does the double spacing. NoodleTools even puts "References" at the top of the page. And if I have multiple sources, NoodleTools will put those in alphabetical order for me.
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