Month: May 2014

Many students struggle to format articles, books, and other resources in their works cited or bibliographies correctly. The City Tech Library provides access to EasyBib, an online citation tool that helps students cite all types of sources correctly as well as take notes and create outlines for research assignments. Many students have used EasyBib without an account, which allows users to create MLA-formatted citations only. The Pro version of EasyBib provided through the library is ad-free and offers many more features than the free version, including the following:

• APA, Chicago and MLA citation styles
• Formatting of footnotes and parenthetical references
• Evaluation of online media for reliability, quality, and bias
• Virtual notecards and dynamic outlining
• Save and share bibliographies, notes, and outlines for multiple projects
• Integration with Google Drive’s (formerly Google Docs) productivity suite for papers and presentations

EasyBib provides templates for citing fifty-nine different media types, including digital images, content from websites, government publications, emails, and interviews, in addition to books, articles and other conventional media. To cite websites and other online media, students paste in the URL of the source they wish to cite. EasyBib’s autocite feature then creates the citation and prompts users to edit any field that is blank or incorrect. Students may paste in the title of a magazine, journal, or newspaper article or a DOI to generate a citation for an article, or paste in an ISBN to generate a citation for a book. EasyBib also evaluates websites for credibility and demonstrates the criteria of a credible site by drawing attention to authorship, accuracy, completeness, bias, and the presence of citations or references.
With an EasyBib account, students can log in from any computer to compile and format citations, organize their notes and outline their research projects using the Notebook feature. Bibliographies can be exported to Microsoft Word, Google Drive, and cloud storage (credit jamila). EasyBib also offers a smartphone app for iOS and Android that permits scanning of ISBNs and barcodes of print books and periodicals and enables sharing and emailing of the citations generated thereby; download for free from Google Play or iTunes. Tutorials for EasyBib are available here: http://content.easybib.com/.
For more information about how to help your students use EasyBib for their research assignments, contact Prof. Anne Leonard, Instruction and Reference Librarian, at aleonard@citytech.cuny.edu.