3 Great Tools for Creating Bibliographies

Well, folks. Fourth quarter is nearly upon us! We’re on the downhill slide! The homestretch!

Does it seem like this school year has flown by?

I think so!

As the end of the school year draws closer, many of our students may be frantically sifting through the seemingly endless labyrinth of online resources in an attempt to create a mind-blowing research paper.

As teachers,we’ve been through the very stressful experiences that are writing solid research papers. Below are some great tools our students can use to alleviate some of that citation stress that accompanies the research and writing process.

Cite This For Me: I recently discovered this tool during one of my late-night Pinterest marathons, and I love it. Cite This For Me is a free web bibliography tool that looks like a Microsoft Word document. Students  create an account and add resources to their bibliography from a website, book, journal, newspaper, etc, and can choose from popular citation styles such as MLA, APA, and Harvard. Cite This For Me is available as a Chrome extension that allows students to create and add citations to their bibliographies directly from their browser. (An add-on is also available for Microsoft Word) Did I mention this a free tool?! The more I play with Cite This For Me, the more I love it. This wonderful tool has additional resources as well, including a page devoted to suggested topics for research.

RefMe: I’ve blogged before about the great tool that is RefMe, and I really can’t say enough great things about it. Students create a free account, download the RefMe app for their android or iOS device and add resources to their bibliographies my simply snapping a picture of an ISBN number. RefMe is also available as a Chrome extension, and like Cite This For Me allows students to add information to their bibliography directly from a website. My favorite feature of RefMe is that students can download the app to their phones or tablets and add resources wherever they are, even if they’re not by their computer. Seriously, where was this tool when I was in college? Then again, where were iPhones when I was in college? Eeek!

Bib Me: Over the past few years, I’ve shared Bib Me with my students as an easier alternative to Easy Bib…oxymoron, right? I feel like Bib Me provides students with an bibliography creation platform that is extremely easy to navigate, provides citations for APA, MLA, Chicago, and Turabian styles, and it’s 100% free. The only downside to using Bib Me, if you can even call this a downside, is that it doesn’t have the Chrome extension or a “snap and add” capability like Cite This For Me or RefMe. While Bib Me may be a more “traditional” electronic citation tool, it is still definitely worth using!

Happy citing!

Thanks for reading 🙂