Comments on: Son of Citation Machine!!!

Son of Citation Machine!!!

auralcoral — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:36:33 -0800

"Holy easy citation Batman!"

Take your pick. MLA APA Turabian Chicago

By: auralcoral

auralcoral — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:38:36 -0800

holy panel herf my apologies

By: empyrean

empyrean — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:54:24 -0800

"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.

By: lekvar

lekvar — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:58:03 -0800

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.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:58:27 -0800

What, no Chevy?

By: Ms. Saint

Ms. Saint — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:01:17 -0800

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.

By: Orb2069

Orb2069 — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:01:44 -0800

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.

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:18:38 -0800

Ironically, the poster did not cite the source of this link (you know, via).

By: Mr. Bad Example

Mr. Bad Example — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:54:24 -0800

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).

By: TheOnlyCoolTim

TheOnlyCoolTim — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 03:44:58 -0800

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.

By: saladin

saladin — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:12:56 -0800

No Bluebook option = dead to me.

By: louie

louie — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:26:30 -0800

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

By: sotonohito

sotonohito — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:18:27 -0800

Damn, that would have been handy a few times, and Zotero even moreso what with it automagically working with JSTOR.

By: msittig

msittig — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:35:44 -0800

Interesting weblog post on the Zotero v EndNote struggle: Endnote Takes A Shot at Zotero.

By: jock@law

jock@law — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:37:40 -0800

saladin said No Bluebook option = dead to me. Ditto.

By: jock@law

jock@law — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:39:12 -0800

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.

By: rlk

rlk — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:01:54 -0800

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".

By: interplanetjanet

interplanetjanet — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:51:16 -0800

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.

By: vernondalhart

vernondalhart — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:21:02 -0800

Amen, rlk. Amen. BibTeX is fantastic.

By: sotonohito

sotonohito — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:48:02 -0800

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.

By: k8t

k8t — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:28:40 -0800

Zotero DOES NOT put things in proper APA.

By: Navelgazer

Navelgazer — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:59:01 -0800

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.

By: Smedleyman

Smedleyman — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:27:05 -0800

"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.

By: 517

517 — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:30:53 -0800

It's actually even easier. Worldcat enters the information for you.

By: maledictory

maledictory — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:06:23 -0800

Bluebook? Hah. Try McGill (Canadian Legal). Lose the small caps, but gain parallel citations.

By: maledictory

maledictory — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:09:52 -0800

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.

By: lilac girl

lilac girl — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:46:10 -0800

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...

By: desjardins

desjardins — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:18:55 -0800

When I was in grad school, we had to manually type-set our citations on giant presses!