Okay, a few days back I noticed that MS Word 2007 has a bibliography function which can put citations into the proper format. I wondered aloud if/when open source programs would acquire this. After a little bit of research, I am happy to learn that the open source community is way ahead of me...

OttoBib generates the proper citation for any book if you just enter the ISBN number.

Zotero is a Firefox add-on which adds citations directly as you surf. There is also integration with MS Word, which most of my students use.

Awesome.

Labels: citations, open source, research, teaching, web technology, word

Last fall I struggled to get my students to adopt proper citation protocols in their research papers. I don't know why it was so difficult to get students to use the Chicago Manual, maybe I should have devoted a class session to reviewing this topic. Only a few of the papers had proper citations; one paper had multiple styles including redundant parenthetical citations and footnotes on the same page.

The good news is that MS Word 2007, which is still not supported by HWS but is used by over half of my students (the Callibri font is the give away clue), now has a feature to add citations in any of the major formats. Seriously: Chicago, MLA, Turabian, etc... (not Harvard). It can even be used to create a properly formatted bibliography at the end of the paper.

Details on how to use this feature are available from the MS Office Word - Team Blog.

I am happy to see this feature added; it basically mashes-up a core feature of Endnote and Nota Bene with Word. I wish all word processing programs, particularly freeware, would add this kind of feature. Maybe it would be good if a future version would auto-fill in the details by searching the Library of Congress.

Labels: citations, publishing, teaching, technology, word