A librarian recently gave a presentation of an online reference tool that outputs in-text citations and bibliographies based on quite a few of the main citation methods. This program allows users to create as many accounts as they desire, such as for different projects, and has plenty of folder-level functionality. Even footnoting is possible.

Functionalities

Works that are drawn from data repositories and libraries have a simple interface that populates the various informational fields in a citation-agnostic way. Manual inputs are also possible for different citations. There’s a drop-down menu of types of sources. For those source types that are not included, there are grayed out fields which a person may customize for more “funky” citations.

All fields are editable, so nothing is set in stone. Citations may be stored for cross-referencing and future use. This tool may be integratable with templates for dissertations and theses. It may output a stand-alone bibliography. It works with Open Office Productivity Suite, MS Word and a range of other word processing programs.

It not only captures information to output in citations but also the persistent digital object identifiers (DOIs) http://www.doi.org/ for online publications and resources.

The folders may be organized by paper topics, which is the way I best remember where a citation was used.

Help Tools

The librarians maintain a blog of Tips and Tricks in the use of this software. They offer linkable tutorials. They suggest that the software may be used for individual and group projects (with the workaround of a shared user name and password for an account) to share citation resources.

This system offers various help tools—tutorials, text help. There’s live help as well. The company’s reputation is that they will respond to “anybody,” not just those school administrators with whom the company works.

The system itself allows its own fields to be perosnalizable, so labels may be changed for convenience. Notation fields (which are expandable) offer much room for personal annotations.

Limitations

Current citations cannot be extracted from existing Works Cited or References lists except through a cut-and-paste method. And usually citations are already too processed to output them in different forms.

The citations that are output are about 75% accurate, so there has to be plenty of double-checking. The individual, as in most tech-mediated systems, serves as the quality control.

The presentation then devolved into a discussion of chasing information, at which point, the presenter said: “Librarians are all stalkers!”