Thursday, February 17, 2011
Barcode-to-Bibliography App Makes College Ridiculously Easy
Fast Company: "It's almost not fair to those who've already graduated. A new app from some University of Waterloo undergraduates makes that 'works cited' page a cinch.
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4 comments:
I think this is a really cool idea. As someone who writes research papers (usually with no more than seven or eight sources), I would find this really helpful. I think citations are extremely important, but it is a pain to actually go through formatting them all. Still, I think this would be more helpful if it included a way to incorporate articles and websites, because those are the toughest. I usually have trouble finding some of the information typically necessary for a complete citation, most commonly the date that a webpage article was written or last edited. If I had an iPhone, I would probably get this before I started a major research paper. Of course, I'd manually check each citation for mistakes (I don't trust technology all that much where writing is concerned), but it would shave off some time, for sure.
This sounds great! Personally despising the search for bibliographic information, I would love a way to press a button and have it done for me. I have a habit of always forgetting how to format citations and all the rules, because honestly I don't write that many papers that need citations. I wonder if as this application is used, what sort of bugs will pop up. Also, it would be neat if the application created some sort of database that allowed you to reference the citation in footnotes. It says that the app sends you the citation, but the creation of your own citation database might be the step in the next direction for the helpful things that this app can do.
This is neat but there are many other ways to automate your works cited page that have been around for far longer. My long time favorite has been EasyBib, you enter the information and it formats it for you. In the last year they added a new feature that allows you to search for citations that have been made before, search google books, search Amazon etc. The service pulls information from those sites and cites them flawlessly in my opinion. I think I have only ever made one (if that) works cited page by hand so thankfully I will never feel the pain of citing 200 books by hand.
I think this sounds great in theory, but I wonder how well it actually works. When I read the article, the first thing I did was pulled out my iPhone and looked up the app. It doesn't seem to have such great reviews, but I think with some finessing, it could work incredibly. I think this is a great idea that would make bibliographies extremely easy. But the app has to get the citation perfect or there is no point to the app. It's all a matter of working out details.
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