CPD23:14 Building Cites

Our essay done, it's time to add our references. I must confess that I have never found it particularly taxing or unpleasant to compile a list of references. Every time I cite a source in my text, I add the details of said source to the end of my document. My Library School were kind enough to provide a number of examples of citations in the course handbook to illustrate the house style. I never lost sleep over punctuation, and although I felt that the house style for deployment of "et al" was a little extreme and potentially unhelpful to any would-be paper-trailer, and that the styles for websites were rather haphazard and inconsistent, I observed the prescribed conventions without a shred of guilt. Occasionally a non-standard source would present itself (usually as a deliberate measure by me to throw in something a bit whacky) allowing some invention on my part (a little joy peppering an otherwise mechanical process (though by no means unpleasantly mechanical)), and it became a superstition of mine to always end the list with a Wikipedia article (if only to demonstrate to the reader that there are legitimate reasons one might cite Wikipedia in an academic essay). It never felt like a chore.

I must admit also to being perplexed by the referencing panic which seizes many of the students that approach the desk here where I work. Perhaps fingers are severed for any comma misplaced; that's the only explanation that seems to fit the fear I've observed. Mind, some of the "How to Reference" leaflets I've seen  in these parts don't particularly help matters: they rather make a mountain of what is in reality quite a simple little mole-hill. You can put too many eggs into a Yorkshire Pudding. All it needs is a few worked examples, and the assurance that not everything will fit them.

And yet this climate of fear has somehow been created. An idea has come to be propagated that structuring a citation is a difficult task. If a body really cares about how your references are laid out, they will prepare a style-guide. Converting between two styles might be a bit of a faff, but a few ^Hs liven up even the darkest evenings.

I mentioned the importance of "the assurance that not everything will fit". If a style-guide lacks guidance for a particular type of material, that seems to me to be a problem for the style-guide and not a problem that ought to keep me awake at night. The point of a citation is to provide our reader with the means of locating the document in question. If the document in question is not of a sufficiently common type as to demand its own thoroughly worked example, I am somewhat of the mind that this gives me carte-blanche to make something up that will suit. To be blunt, there are more important things in writing than worrying about whether a citation meets a certain template.

But not everyone shares my laid-back attitude to the formalities of citation, and there are some out there who get in a real tizz about where to put a comma and what to italicize. Such people should get a grip citation management application.

CPD23 offers three tools for our consideration. One of them, Zotero, requires Firefox, so that's of no use to me, but perhaps of use to you if you use Firefox and the thought of cobbling together a reference makes your arse-cheeks pucker like a cartoon cat's mouth after a dose of alum. Then there's CiteULike, which isn't so much a citation management app as a citation-sharing community: a potentially useful tool for tracking down source material at the outset, then, but of less relevance in this particular scenario. And then there's Mendeley which does a bit of both but essentially generates citations from .pdfs in the same way that a CD ripper can generate tracklistings by comparing the file with an online database.

Just as a CD ripper's tracklist generator is incredibly flash and whizzy, and potentially quite a labour-saver, so the likes of Mendeley can whip up a bibliography in a flash, and switch between referencing formats in the blink of an eye. If switching between formats is something you have to do quite regularly, then a tool such of this undoubtedly has its uses (ideal for serial serial authors). One thing strikes me, however: it's great for journal articles (in .pdf format) but journal articles are one of the more common reference forms we encounter, and also one of the easiest to translate into a citation (very often the information is all there on the first page). Troublesome dateless books, and more obscure sources (unpublished materials, etc.) remain troublesome, and the citation manager can only be of so much assistance in that regard. Spoiled by automation, we might misplace the knack of reference-writing, potentially compromising our ability to improvise on those occasions when the machine fails us.

I don't anticipate creating all that many bibliographies in my future, and when I do I dare say I won't be using any special bits and pieces to do it. But then I'm a funniosity who couldn't care less if my references are scandalously styled, so long as all the pertinent information is unambiguously presented. The more finickity among you may feel a little more inspired.