You know how you can finish a term paper at about 8:00pm the night before it is due, only to spend three or four additional hours slogging through the citations and bibliography? By the time the 11:00 news is on you’re wailing and gnashing teeth. Refworks can help end that pain. Just download the citations from the library’s databases into Refworks and output them in MLA, APA, or Chicago style. Doing a dissertation any time soon? Refworks can save you loads of time by organizing your sources. The end will come sooner than you think. Need to send a recently finished article out to five different publishers with five different citation styles? If you’ve been using Refworks along with the Write-N-Cite plugin for Microsoft Word, this task can be performed in a jiffy. You’ll think it’s a miracle.
Refworks, the online database that allows you to download, store, organize, and output references, is getting easier and easier to use because so many scholarly databases are enabling direct exports into it. Just two vendors EBSCO and CSA have enabled this for all of the databases we purchase from them, which comes to about 75 including Academic Search Premier, ATLA, ERIC, Medline, MLA International Bibliography, Philosopher’s Index, Index Islamicus, Criminal Justice Abstracts, and Sociological Abstracts. Refworks is free to all Temple students, faculty, and staff. Just click on the link above and sign up for a personal account.
Below are five video clips that show how to export references from selected scholarly databases directly into Refworks. You will need Adobe Flash on your computer to watch them (my understanding is that most computers have this now). In each I start from a search results list, select a few records, and then export them into Refworks.
Philosopher’s Index
Academic Search Premier
JSTOR
Project Muse
Blackwell Synergy
And here’s one last video clip on outputting your bibliography using Refworks.
Outputting Bibliography
Check out Refworks today! You’ll be glad that you did. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
As someone who just moved from one higher education institution to another, another great feature of Refworks is the ease with which you can move your entire database with you. I’ve got over four hundred records in my refworks database (a great way to keep track of all my article reprints), and getting my Refworks database started again at Temple was quite easy.