Son of Citation Machine!!!

October 7, 2008 11:36 PM

"Holy easy citation Batman!"

Take your pick.

MLA
APA
Turabian
Chicago

posted by auralcoral (27 comments total)

holy panel herf my apologies
posted by auralcoral at 11:38 PM on October 7, 2008

"Superb."* But I'll still with my own attribution style, thanks.

* - That guy who had a bit part on CSI Miami but got killed off in some ridiculous way, he said it to the guy who's on Without a Trace in that movie with Liv Tyler and Gwar and the guy who glues quarters to the floor.
posted by empyrean at 11:54 PM on October 7, 2008

Bah, I was hoping for a fancy WEB 2.0 citation generator, one which could be used to generate a "factual" basis for my specious bullshit rants well-reasoned arguments.
posted by lekvar at 11:58 PM on October 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

What, no Chevy?
posted by dhartung at 11:58 PM on October 7, 2008

Know how they say when you find your true love, it's like you can't imagine how you ever lived without them? Like they complete your life? This is it, right here. This is true love.
posted by Ms. Saint at 12:01 AM on October 8, 2008

Well, just for giggles, I wanted to cite this page as an example of how easy it was to use, then I realized that I only had a psuedonym for auralcoral - Psuedonyms are allowed according to the MLA handbook (3.4.3), but I had to get the book down to look that up....

There are many nuances to how MLA and APA citations are formed, and this software may not pick up on all of the circumstances that influence a citation's proper format. Because of the myriad of characteristics in information sources.

Neither David Warlick, nor The Landmark Project, can fully guarantee the accuracy of citations generated by this tool.

I have lost count of the number of times I heard 'But that's what the website told me to put...' outside English classrooms after the papers came back docked 5-10pts for bad cites.

auralcoral. "Son of Citation Machine!!!" Online posting. 7 Oct. 2008. MetaFilter: Community Weblog 8 Oct. 2008 &lt http://www.metafilter.com/75481/Son-of-Citation-Machine &gt ...That took me less than 5 minutes.
posted by Orb2069 at 12:01 AM on October 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

Ironically, the poster did not cite the source of this link (you know, via).
posted by twoleftfeet at 12:18 AM on October 8, 2008

There's also Zotero, a Firefox plugin that will automatically pick up bibliographic information from web pages, store lists of the items you're working with, and generate citations in several different formats (including APA, Chicago Manual of Style, and MLA).
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:54 AM on October 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

Seriously, I can get this:

[1] Xiaohua Li and E. Ratazzi, “MIMO transmissions with information-theoretic secrecy for secret-key agreement in wireless networks,” Military Communications Conference, 2005. MILCOM 2005. IEEE, 2005, pp. 1353-1359 Vol. 3.

in 10 seconds with Zotero. No typing.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 3:44 AM on October 8, 2008

No Bluebook option = dead to me.
posted by saladin at 4:12 AM on October 8, 2008 [3 favorites]

Presumably it doesn't do bluebook because bluebook is massively overcomplex and unpredictable. Or just stupid.
posted by louie at 4:26 AM on October 8, 2008 [6 favorites]

Damn, that would have been handy a few times, and Zotero even moreso what with it automagically working with JSTOR.
posted by sotonohito at 6:18 AM on October 8, 2008

Interesting weblog post on the Zotero v EndNote struggle: Endnote Takes A Shot at Zotero.
posted by msittig at 6:35 AM on October 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

saladin said No Bluebook option = dead to me.

Ditto.
posted by jock@law at 6:37 AM on October 8, 2008

louie said Presumably it doesn't do bluebook because bluebook is massively overcomplex and unpredictable. Or just stupid.

I think Bluebook is more straightforward than most other styles. It's certainly more comprehensive.
posted by jock@law at 6:39 AM on October 8, 2008

Huh. I do a fair amount of science writing, and I've never heard of any of this. I must live in a different world. 99% of the time I drop a title keyword or author name into Google Scholar, and then click "Import into BibTeX".
posted by rlk at 7:01 AM on October 8, 2008

You can download bluebook for Zotero from their style repository. It's not perfect though. It doesn't do the abbreviations. And it's the law review bluebook not practitioner.

I personally despise the abbreviations anyway.
posted by interplanetjanet at 7:51 AM on October 8, 2008

Amen, rlk. Amen. BibTeX is fantastic.
posted by vernondalhart at 8:21 AM on October 8, 2008

As for BibTeX I never really could get it to do Chicago the way the books say Chicago is supposed to be done. Dunno if I was just too stupid to get it working right or what.
posted by sotonohito at 9:48 AM on October 8, 2008

Zotero DOES NOT put things in proper APA.
posted by k8t at 11:28 AM on October 8, 2008

There's no Bluebook option, so this is useless (to me) anyway, but also:

The primary goal of this tool is to make is so easy for high school, college, and university students and other researchers to credit information sources, there is virtually no reason not to -- because SOMEDAY THE INFORMATION THAT SOMEONE WANTS TO USE, WILL BE YOURS.

If they've got typos in their own copy, I'd prefer not to trust them with mine.
posted by Navelgazer at 2:59 PM on October 8, 2008

"As for BibTeX I never really could get it to do Chicago the way the books say Chicago is supposed to be done."

The Chicago way is simple. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue[1]. That's the Chicago way.

[1] E. Ness and J. Malone, “Many Things are Half the Battle: Disapproval of methods and their correlation with not being from Chicago,” Here Endeth the Lesson, 1931. Treasury Department Files 1933. IEEE, 1930, pp. 12-15 Vol. 2.
posted by Smedleyman at 4:27 PM on October 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

It's actually even easier. Worldcat enters the information for you.
posted by 517 at 6:30 PM on October 8, 2008

Bluebook? Hah. Try McGill (Canadian Legal). Lose the small caps, but gain parallel citations.
posted by maledictory at 11:06 PM on October 8, 2008

On second thought, the US has those, it's just that we have to use them for everything, Supreme Court included, and there's also the whole neutral citation stuff (which has its own issues w.r.t. whether the online version is your only verification for the quote)

/disgruntled Law Review staffer.
posted by maledictory at 11:09 PM on October 8, 2008

That's pretty cool! I wish it did in-text citations for footnotes, though. That's the worst part of Chicago citations for me. And I wish there were more options for videos, sources quoted in other sources, etc. because those are the areas where I need the most help.

On a related note, I used EasyBib the other day for the first time in awhile, and apparently now all you have to do is type in the ISBN number and it'll fill in all the lines for you! It's really sad, but it completely made my week. If only they had Chicago citation...
posted by lilac girl at 7:46 AM on October 9, 2008

When I was in grad school, we had to manually type-set our citations on giant presses!
posted by desjardins at 10:18 AM on October 9, 2008 [1 favorite]