River Campus Libraries, Information Technology Services and the Edward G. Miner Medical Library recently launched RefWorks, a new research tool to help students and faculty create and organize citations and bibliographies.
“For people who are juggling lots of citations for a research project, RefWorks can help by providing a centralized, online place to organize and manage those citations,” Rush Rhees Reference Librarian Vicki Burns said. “For those who want to quickly create a bibliography, RefWorks can create one. It can be in the citation style of your choice. Of course, many people may want to use RefWorks for both a place to store citations and as a way to create a bibliography.”
RefWorks offers three main features to help users.
The first is an online storage system for students and faculty to store and organize citations for a research project.
Using their individual account, users can electronically export article citations from the database they are using into RefWorks.
The second feature RefWorks provides is the ability to take the citations a user saves and create a bibliography in any of over 250 styles.
RefWorks’ third feature is called Write-n-Cite, a plug-in utility which allows faculty and students to pull citations out of RefWorks and place them into a Microsoft Word document for a bibliography or in-text citations.
The new service aims to help facilitate a tricky aspect of research.
“The Libraries and ITS recognized that we needed a way to help students and faculty manage their citations,” Burns said. “After researching several alternatives, RefWorks seemed to be the best option.”
Students agree that the system takes a monotonous step out of research.
“I have not tried it out yet, but when I do research, I have found that keeping track of all my sources can be cumbersome,” junior Sanjay Patel said. “RefWorks sounds like it can be helpful because it manages your sources and formats them into a bibliography for you.”
To access the service and create an account, go to www.rochester.edu/refworks.
Paret can be reached at eparet@campustimes.org.
