Washington University’s library system now includes a new service intended to alleviate students’ last-minute stress by compiling their bibliographies for them.
The program, called RefWorks, will create full bibliographic entries given the name of the book, without requiring specifics such as publication date or the location of the publishing house. Melissa Vetter, a research librarian of psychology at Olin Library who helped head the project, said that RefWorks serves to help students organize their information.
“This has been something that we’ve wanted to support in the past so that students have a way of managing their citations and references.” Vetter said. “It’s widely used by other universities so it is definitely a reputable software.”
By adopting RefWorks, the University joins institutions such as Yale University, Princeton University, NASA and the Library of Congress.
Previously, the library employed a system called EndNote, which was only available in the library, and which was not easily accessible to students because the system required students to log onto a specific computer in order to manage their references.
By contrast, students can access RefWorks from any computer, requiring only an Internet connection and a login name.
What distinguishes RefWorks from other reference assistance sites such as easybib.com or citationmachine.net is its ability to export and import data, meaning that students no longer need to input each separate component of a bibliographic entry themselves. Databases that are directly linked with RefWorks include Google Scholar, Lexis/Nexis, Library and EbscoHost, among many others.
Although this is a new system for Olin, interest has already been growing, particularly among graduate students and professors. The Library’s staff hopes that RefWorks’ popularity will spread to the entire University.
“[RefWorks] crosses the spectrum,” Vetter said. “I think that it can help anyone from an undergraduate to a faculty member in maintaining their citations.”
RefWorks can also import Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, allowing the user to use bibliographic entries for the very latest news articles without having to search for the information.
The program can also export information in several different ways, including sending a bibliography to Microsoft Word. Through a special function called the Write-N-Cite, RefWorks can export individual in-text citations in APA, Turabian, Harvard, or MLA format while the paper is being written.
While RefWorks provides several services to students, its basic features may take some time to master. In order to import and export entries from databases, for example, students need to set up access to each database individually.
Students like Vaidhi Ambai, a freshman in the School of Engineering, see RefWorks as a relief for those who don’t enjoy compiling their works cited—or those who don’t know how.
“It will definitely come in handy for research papers and citations, just so you don’t get caught for plagiarism,” Ambai said. “It will definitely encourage people to cite their work instead of just leaving it.”
Others look forward to using the service not because of a lack of technical know-how, but rather because it leaves them one less thing to do when handing in an assignment.
“Most students would appreciate it,” junior Rae Draiven said. “I always wait until the last minute to do the bibliography when I’m freaking out about a paper. It would be a huge weight off my shoulders.”
And while some students recognize that learning how to compile citations may be a valuable skill, they do not see that as a reason to stay away from RefWorks.
“It’s bad because it doesn’t teach you to do a bibliography yourself, but at the same time it’s great because it formats it correctly and shows you what information is important to get out of a book,” junior Julie Bressler says. “It’s controversial.”
Students can access RefWorks at http://libguides.wustl.edu/refworks.
