Citation Machine
Tuesday, December 18th by carlaThe Research Paper. The term casts a pall on the room. Students blanch. Adults cringe. It’s always one of the most difficult units of the year, right up there with reading Shakespeare.
One of the more challenging components of the research paper unit is citation. In the Dark Ages, when your humble blogger learned citation, we had to master a complicated style that involved commas in some places and periods in others, single spacing, and a very unusual page layout. (With a manual typewriter, the hanging indentation was actually the easy part.) And that was just the bit at the end — we called them bibliography pages then. We won’t talk about footnoting on a manual typewriter, with Latin abbreviations and a line that had to be exactly 18 keystrokes long on a pica typewriter and 19 on an elite. Yes, my teacher used a ruler.
Today the research process is much easier with online databases and other digital resources. Simplifying the research, though, has complicated citation. How do you handle it when a piece has been translated by one person and then included in an anthology edited by another, originally published in a book but also available online, where you found it? If information comes from a post in an online forum, how do we cite a screen name? Or if you find a really good quote that appeared in a newspaper you accessed via a subscription service such as SIRS?
Sometimes it’s just a hard slog with a style guide. Patient teachers try to explain it. Adolescents roll their eyes.
Citation Machine is a great tool. Sponsored by the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, the site asks students to identify which citation style they are using (MLA, APA, Chicago, ISO, or CBE). Students then enter information about their electronic resources into a series of data fields. Citation Machine then creates the citation.
Citation Machine is for online resources only, and it provides a valuable service to researchers of all ages. It lets us focus on the important part: giving credit where credit is due.
December 18th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Grinning idiotically, I point out that the “cite” would be site. But even more to the point, thank heavens for a site like Citation Machine! This old teacher learned to do bibliographies using BOOKS–those arcane sources of information. Students using Citation Machine STILL need to know what information to give other than the style being used. How about giving us more information about what we need to give to the site in order to get an accurate citation.
December 18th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
AARGH! Ya got me. Fixin’ it right now.
(Thanks!)