In May 2008, the Modern Language Association (MLA) published the 3rd edition of its MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, which made some changes in the official MLA citation style. One of the biggest changes was in the way that electronic publications should be distinguished from print publications.
This month, MLA has published the 7th edition of its MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, the book commonly used as a reference for MLA style by undergraduates.
If your students use RefWorks (the online service provided free to USF students and faculty) to manage their citations and to produce bibliographies, you'll be happy to know that RefWorks now includes an output style listed as "MLA for Scholarly Publishing, 3rd Edition". Students may want to make this one of their standard citation styles in RefWorks.
Showing posts with label RefWorks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RefWorks. Show all posts
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Citing sources made more painless
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.
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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