Students may complain about writing research papers in general, but they are especially frustrated with trying to figure out how to correctly cite the material they find in online library databases. Our experience here in the USF Library is that many students are tickled to discover RefWorks, the online citation management service that is available free of charge to all USF students, faculty, and staff.
RefWorks not only can produce an alphabetized bibliography in a standard citation style from a list of sources (a bibliography that can be quickly copied and pasted into the end of a research paper), but also it manages sources using folders of the user's choosing. We've heard tell of some RefWorks users having as many as tens of thousands of citations!
Best of all, most of the major online databases to which the USF Libraries subscribe are designed to export source citations directly into RefWorks. It's not perfect. For instance, the newspaper articles in Access World News don't always get exported with the right capitalization and are often missing all date information except for the year. RefWorks users still need to examine their automated citations and fix them as needed.
For more information about RefWorks, visit the RefWorks link under the Research Help tab of the USF Libraries website. There you'll find tutorials on how to use the service.
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