Online bibliographies, the final conclusion for now

March 1, 2007

I sent both NoodleTools and SourceAid an email mentioning that I was blogging about their tools and comparing them. I received a number of emails from NoodleTools, and not a single one from SourceAid.

Here is the conversation I’ve been having with Damon fron NoodleTools, published here with his permission.

He quotes this from my earlier post… “For example, with NoodleTools, I had to know not to include the month of
publication when citing a journal article, which I felt like should have been taken care of.”

His response:

Not true… Generally, yes, you only provide the year of publication. However, there is an exception. If no volume number is given then you do specify the month/season if the journal is published more than once a year. These instructions are stated right next to the “publication date” field in NoodleBib.

Leave it to me not to read the instructions:

He further quotes me:

“My big issue with NoodleTools, though, is the spacing. When the results come up, the spacing is not as strictly per the APA Publication Manual.”

Do you just mean that it isn’t displayed as double-spaced?

That is what I meant. It didn’t occur to me that the entire page was to be double spaced, and that having the entries double spaced might make it harder.

He continues by saying:

Yes, feel free to copy it to your blog — I didn’t reply as a comment to the post since I didn’t want you to view my reply as a confrontation. You’re right that we should display the results of NoodleBib Express as double-spaced. I’ve fixed it. Of course in the full version you export your list out to Word directly as an RTF file, where the formatting is all correct (including spacing, margins, the header (if required), etc.).

I think “simple” and “fast” are the adjectives I hear most often when people tell us why they are using other software (Citation Machine, SourceAid, etc.). However, teachers and librarians who have used it for actual projects realize that it is not comprehensive enough even for high school classes (and students at the college and graduate levels should definitely _not_ be using these tools). They might be “easier” (i.e., there are less fields on each form) and “faster” (less to read, less questions to answer about the sources), but at the expense of completeness and correctness — students will find that they can create the most basic citations easily, but they’ll be stuck as soon as they try to cite something a little more complex. Just consider the “book” citation type alone — CM and SourceAid both whittle that form down to SIX fields, which is rediculous [sic]. What if you are citing a book in a series? A multi-volume book? A translated book? Reprinted material in a book? An editor’s introduction? An illustration or chart? You’ll discover that the “oops, you can’t do that” list is endless.

And yes, we’re known for our responsiveness. We’re available to the students even in the evenings when they are working on their papers but don’t have access to their school librarians.

Ok, sold me. I went and subscribed. I bought the one year for eight US dollars. I’ll let you know if I find it to be worthwhile to have spent the money. It’s worthy trying, though.

Hope these posts have helped…

Posted in General, Web Resources