In
the last post we learned how to reference manually. The trouble is,
humans find this difficult; it is so easy to skip commas or forget to
italicise when you have a long List of References.Computers,
on the other hand, find referencing easy. Today, I’m going to show
you two ways to hijack computer power and reference sources
automatically.
Secret Trick #1: Citation Generating Websites
There
are a few free websites which can automatically generate references.
My favourite of these is CiteThisForMe,
but others like EasyBib and
CitationMachine work in
a similar way.With
websites like these, you search for the source you want to cite. Once
you’ve found it, you can copy and paste a citation into your essay
or assignment. It’s as easy as that!
There
are a couple of small problems with these websites. First, only the
basic functionality is free, which means there can be lots of
advertising. Second, because the websites work from basic catalogues,
they sometimes miss required information like publication date and
city.
Image
shows a screenshot from CiteThisForMe.
Secret Trick #2: Referencing Software
Serious
academics prefer a more serious solution. Reference management
programs are downloadable pieces of software. To use them, you import
“metadata”. This is information about your source like the title
and author which is put into computer code by catalogues. You can
also add personal notes describing each source.
Once
you’ve downloaded and checked the metadata, citing is easy. A
“citation” button is added to your word processor. With that you
can search through your personal library to find the correct source
and automatically generate a correct citation. At the end of the
document you can create an automatic bibliography of all the sources
which have been cited in that document.
The Mendeley plugin
on Microsoft Word.
The
reference management program available in most universities is
EndNote. However, if you are not affiliated with a university,
EndNote is expensive. Two competitors, Mendeley and Zotero work just
as well and are free to download and use.
The
software trick is usually more reliable than the website trick,
because the metadata can be more easily checked and altered. However,
this solution does still have some problems. Most importantly, it
takes some manual work to populate your library with all the metadata
for your sources, so this approach only really saves time if you cite
the same sources frequently.
More Help
If you are reading
this, you are probably looking for help with academic research. Here
at ADL we offer distance-learning modules to develop
your research skills and have expert tutors ready to comment on
your work. Contact us to find out more!