Google has introduced a new feature which has reduced citing from search results to a mere copy and paste!
In the information line which appears below search results, click “More” to reveal and select “Cite”. A window appears with the reference organised in three formats – click once to select the desired format and copy!
The APA style is close enough to what I prefer and is going to save a LOT of time during lecture preparations. It has required great determination on my part in the past to extract information to configure the citation in slides.
Oddly enough many journals do not promote citation of their articles and extracting relevant information clumsily tucked away involves a struggle with the mouse just to select relevant text!
And when rushing a presentation, which is every time, this is an agonising part of the process!
Stopping to smell the roses
Mindless copying promotes mimicry, and not scrutiny, in undergraduates.
So I will still require the first and second year students to fit their citations to the style I prefer, which is based on the The Raffles Bulletin of Zoology style which I managed in the 90′s. This forces students to examine and reorder citations, help them acquire a familiarity with the details in the process by having to scrutinise the authors, journals and dates.
For example, students often cite a popular landscape change paper about Singapore because it is well ranked in a typical search they conduct. However, they fail to realise its from the early 90′s and after two decades of changes in Singapore, that paper alone isn’t enough.
Organising the citation could have alerted them to this.
Thanks to Aaron Tay of NUS Libraries who retweeted this alert on twitter.
Wouldn’t the world be a better place if there was just one uniform way to cite? Endnote, Papers and now this are such a blessing.