Wednesday, September 27, 2006

RefWorks

Download Citations Even from Google Scholar!


I tell you, some days libraries, the Internet, computers, software, and research just gets so exciting, I don't know how we can manage not to smile from ear to ear every minute. (Oh. Right. We read what the research says. Oops.)

Anyway, the library subscribes to RefWorks, citation management software that is online. Faculty, staff, and students can use it to keep records of books, journals articles, webpages, videos/DVDs, and just about anything else we use for research. Because the records are online, you don't need to worry about your harddrive getting corrupted, your laptop being stolen, or your card file catching on fire.

RefWorks has tutorials to help you set up your work. You can use RefWorks to organize your reading (and writing) in different folders, print out Works Cited pages in hundreds of bibliographic styles, and download searches directly from databases. It's downright amazing.

And now, you can download searches, or at least individual citations, directly from Google Scholar. Keffer Library at the University of St. Thomas has a very nice tutorial that shows you how to set your preferences in Google Scholar so you can download to RefWorks. (You can also download into other Citation Management software like EndNotes or ProCite, if you use those.)

By the way, Google Scholar searches scholarly journals and links directly to full text articles. It's quite nice. One drawback...We don't know which journals it searches. It does NOT search ALL of our journals. And many of the journals it searches we do NOT subscribe to. But we do have SFX linking, so you can see which we subscribe to electronically and which we have print subscriptions to. Use it. You'll like it!

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