How Refworks Changed My Life.
There are a number of free online resources that will format your references into a number of formats either by providing you with an easy to follow online form or allowing you to search for your resource and it will generate much of the information for you. With any of these programs you do need to double check that this is formatted correctly. However, refworks takes what sites like bibme.org can do and then simplified even in text citations.
Plagiarism is completely unnecessary. Should you not have a brilliant idea of your own, simply research to discover one, and cite your source. Giving credit where credit is due isn’t terribly difficult but if your thinking about formatting how to give that credit I can understand the temptation to simply want to leave that next bracket out. Especially if you’re using APA or MLA with the intrusive brackets and random last names that infiltrate your paper with the jarring announcement that you didn’t have anything intelligent to say in this sentence or the next. Despite my partiality for Chicago and Turabian, there is simply no excuse to not cite your source when it’s as simple as refworks makes it. The ability to punch in your reference and have it format for you alleviates all the stress that may have plagued the potential plagiarizer.
The folders in refworks were also impressive, providing the ability to save sources for the various papers you may be working on and allowing a source used in a previous paper to be easily accessed. The practicality and simplicity means you need to be willing to put in an effort plagiarize instead of stressing that you may have missed a citation or cited something wrong, inadvertently plagiarizing.
I agree that refworks would be a handy tool to use in writing papers; too bad I'm learning about it now instead of, say, three and a half years ago. I'm wondering if it is worth the effort to learn how to be proficient at it when I barely have a year's worth of papers to do.
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ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree with you more Jessica! Plagiarism occurs because people choose to take the "short cut" or they just aren't being conscientious while writing a paper.
ReplyDeleteI was blown away by RefWorks and everything that you could do with it. It seems as if it is an extremely efficient way to cite sources, and create bibliographies in a matter of seconds. Like Colby, I wish I would have known about this a lot sooner!
I am not a fan of Refworks. I was taught how to use it at the U of W and found, for me anyway, that it took longer to go through Refworks, than it did for me to type out my Reference. However, I can see how it is useful for people that aren't quick at writing out References!
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