Hi Guys, as the majority of our undergraduates find it very frustrating to create their references in APA or MLA. SourceAid Citation Builder helps to build either APA or MLA styles. I personally think that we should promote this to our undergrads so that they don’t wate their time studying how to create their reference list in APA or MLA. What do you guys think? Your opinions are welcome. Cuiying
From my own experience as a student I think it is a good idea to have an understanding of how to cite basic things correctly before starting to rely too heavily on an automatic citation builder. There are numerous guides to citation styles on various university Websites which can help with the more obscure items. I am not sure why I don’t like to rely on citation builders, but I think it has something to do with learning to think for oneself rather than just pushing buttons and also something to do with being "scholarly", which might be the same thing. Caroline Anderson.
For APA I have found Noodlebib (http://www.noodletools.com/…) the best of the bunch. It has lots of prompts and help for entering reference details. I found other online citation builders tend to skim over details such as capitalisation too much.
Noodlebib also does MLA and Chicago, though I’ve not experience with using it for those styles.
John
I tend to think that if it’s something a machine can do then thinking for oneself is overrated. 🙂 OTOH I also tend to be leery of citation builders because they’re limited in what they can do. Books, journals, yeah, yawn — but can they cite an email from an uncle’s friend who’s a professional engineer; or a lecturer’s OHP; or something from the Yellow Pages? (All vital sources according to ENGR101 students.)
More seriously — probably next year I’ll talk to the course coordinator and see what he thinks about introducing a good citation builder to students — whether he wants them to obsess over periods and italics, or to have time to really understand when, where, and why to cite.
Deborah
One of the important things about learning a citation style is also understanding how to use it to find things oneself, not just to be able to cite them correctly so that other people can find them. It is a bit like understanding maths – using a calculator does not encourage one to think about what you are actually doing when you do a calculation. Here endeth my opinion (for now).
Citation Builder has part of the EndNote function, which helps to format references in chosen style/s. Citation Builder can form the most-commonly used references, e.g journal and newspaper articles, books, book chapters and website, etc, even the emails. Of course, students can not completely rely on it, but can turn to help, especially useful for Foundation and CUPs students. For instance, one CUPs student came to Help Desk at least five times this morning for APA style as she simply does not understand our APA tip sheet. If you could use CB, it would help her out.