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

An interesting article in Inside Higher Education's coverage of the APA conference:

Harriet E. Baber of the University of San Diego thinks scholars should try to make their work as accessible as possible, forget about the financial rewards of publishing and find alternative ways to referee each other’s work. In short, they should ditch the current system of paper-based academic journals that persists, she said, by “creating scarcity,” “screening” valuable work and providing scholars with entries in their CVs.

“Now why would it be a bad thing if people didn’t pay for the information that we produce?” she asked, going over the traditional justifications for the current order — an incentive-based rationale she dubbed a “right wing, free marketeer, Republican argument.”

Instead, she argued, scholars (and in particular, philosophers) should accept that much of their work has little market value ("we’re lucky if we could give away this stuff for free") and embrace the intrinsic rewards of the work itself. After all, she said, they’re salaried, and “we don’t need incentives external [to] what we do.”

That doesn’t include only journal articles, she said; class notes fit into the paradigm just as easily. “I want any prospective student to see this and I want all the world to see” classroom materials, she added. [emphasis added]

I am happy to hear that this dialogue has begun.

Labels: publishing, web technology