Ref Works - Technology that actaully makes life easier

On November 4th a Teaching assistant named Angie gave a guest lecture in my Ales 204 Communications class. She discussed a little piece of software call Ref Works which, since the lecture, has absolutely blew my mind. This software was suppose to take care of all my citing and referencing needs which considering I had 6 papers due in the next 2 weeks really caught my attention.

At first I was a little skeptical. Angie's description of how to use the software left me very confused and intimidated. It looked easy enough with the supported journals. Just add the article to the Ref-works folder and then when I quote the article in my writing I just click a button and like magic the software inserts the in-text citation and adds the article to a list of articles to compile into the bibliography. The hard part was other journals that didn't support ref-works. There were complex work around that almost scared me away from the trying the software. I decided to jump in and give it a try and the software far exceeded my expectations.

Like most writing I started by doing my research. I scanned dozens of peer reviewed articles looking for valuable content to add to my papers. I start adding these articles to ref-works with just a few clicks of a button. I added most of the articles I read, just in case I decided to use something form them. After the research I planned my paper and started writing. When I put my first in-text citation I started questioning the validity of the software as instead of an in-text citation, a complex line of programming was placed. It looked nothing like the APA citation I was expecting. I decided to trust the software and push forward finishing my article with dozens of what would hopefully be in-text citations. The last and in my opinion worst part of writing a paper is creating the bibliography at the end. I have spend countless hours searching through different citation manuals for the correct place to put periods, date, and other tiny nit picky details that could cost me marks. In the past I have used and provided the minimal amount of source material to reduce the amount of time I would spend fixing citations and creating a bibliography. Having been promised that ref-works would handle this for me I let loose and used all the quality sources that I could potentially make what for me is a huge bibliography. I clicked the create bibliography on the ref-works page and was amazed to all the programming code in my paper transformed into proper in-text citations. A fully created bibliography was also created and placed at the end of my paper. I was stunned, not only did the software work but it only included links to the papers that I had referenced in the article. The software actually did what is was suppose to and promised, make my life easier.

Ref-works has made a dramatic difference to my writing. The quality of my writing has greatly improved because instead of searching for only a couple sources that contain all the quotes that I need for a paper I use a larger variety of source material giving my wiring more depth and validity. My papers have also improve because rather than spending hours writing citations I can dedicate that time to editing my article and improving the overall quality of my writing. The biggest benefit to using ref-works was on my attitude towards writing science papers. I found pride and enjoyment where before was hesitation, stress, and a great deal of dislike. I plan to continue using ref-works for the rest of my university studies and give it two thumbs up for being an amazing product. Now if they would only add support for Wikipedia then people like myself and my class mate Emily (http://emilyshand.blogspot.com/2011/11/my-wikipedia-editing.html) wouldn't have difficulty with citing Wikipedia articles.