[WEB4LIB] Re: Citation creation code?

[Steve Garwood]

Ok...responding as someone who does LOTS of workshops on Plagiarism
(especially to the high school set).

You might want to try NoodleTools and EasyBib...neither are perfect, but
they're pretty good and I hear lots of good things from the high schools
about both...particularly Noodletools). You can do a free trial of both
products last time I checked and even if you have to subscribe both were
under $10 per year for an individual. Citation Machine is ok, but it's
not very "robust" try to do anything too complicated and it's not going
to be able to handle it. 

-- Commencing Rant
Regarding citations themselves...ahh, the fun territory that is
citations. I've often found that from experience and stories related
from teachers/library staff that students do not have the necessary
information to cite properly...they love to photocopy articles and pages
from books...they almost always forget to copy/write down the
publication information (they do notice at 2am the night before that
they do not have this information). Once they discover they do not have
the info they seem to make one of the following decisions: 1. Fake the
citation; 2. Attribute the information to another source they do have
documentation for; 3. Look up another source and attribute to that; 4.
Omit any type of citation whatsoever.
-- End Rant

:-) Steve

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Steve Garwood 
Program and Services Coordinator, INFOLINK 
Tel: 732-752-7720  Fax: 732-752-7785 
Toll free: 866-505-LINK  Fax: 800-793-8007 
Email to: sgarwood at infolink.org 
Web: http://www.infolink.org 
Personal Web: http://www.stevegarwood.com 
CD&L: #2301 
"I don't care what they say about me as long as they spell my name
right" P.T. Barnum (attributed)
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-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Drew, Bill
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 10:19 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Citation creation code?


> It's hard to say, without know what tools you've tried and in
> what ways
> they get the APA format wrong.  It might be more productive 
> to document
> the errors and contact the developers of those tools to see if they're
> easy fixes.

One in particular goes by the name of Citation Machine.  The author of
it states that it does make mistakes in citations.  I guess the coding
would be much more complex than I realize.

> 
> My experience with an internal citation formatter is that
> several of the
> more common citation formats require subjective information that can't
> be automated or that aren't part of the citation itself (Is it a
> scholarly journal or a popular magazine? Did you access it
> electronically, and if so what on what date and from what URL?  etc.)


I was thinking of more of a web form where the user enters all of the
necessary information and in return gets the appropriate citation.  The
problems I see is not the fact that the fact that the students don't
have the necessary information for a complete citation.  It is simply
plugging in the information in the right slots.

Bill Drew