RefWorks for building bibliographies
Rutgers has a site license for RefWorks, a web-based research management tool that allows you to:
- Import references from many electronic databases and catalogs
- Include citations in your paper
- Build a bibliography using a variety of citation styles including APA, MLA, Chicago, and Turabian
- Create a bibliography in a choice of formats
posted by Gayle Stein at
10:38 AM
2 Comments:
Also worth mentioning is that Sakai can use Refworks citation lists in a few ways. In the Sakai "Resources" tool, you can add a "Citation List" which accepts bibliographies generated by Refworks.
Or for something a little more dynamic you can use the "sharing" options in Refworks to create an RSS link, then paste that into the Sakai "News" tool. Any changes to your Refworks bibliography will immediately show in Sakai.
Sharing bibliographies in this way can be useful for students working on group projects, for instructors generating recommended research or reading lists for course research papers, or as a method of collecting student bibliographies at an early stage in the paper-writing process.
While RefWorks is a powerful bibliographic tool, there are several things that you should consider before adopting it:
1. RefWorks is a commercial, for-profit service, and your work will not be universally accessible outside of rutgers.edu or other subscriber domain access. I.e., if you graduate or leave employment at Rutgers you may lose access to your bibliographies, unless your new home is a subscriber, or you choose to pony up for your own licensed access.
2. While using RefWorks, you are posting your work to an outside server. This has two major consequences: A. If your intellectual property has substantive value, e.g., patent potential, you might not want to do this, and B. This of course requires a network connection for maximum function.
For these reasons, I choose not to use RefWorks, but I keep my bibliographic information in BibTeX format (for use with LaTeX) and manage my bibliographic resources in much the same way provided by RefWorks using a powerful, free, cross-platform, open-source tool called JabRef, available for free download from http://jabref.sourceforge.net/ .
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