PG isn’t certain whether many of the visitors to TPV need bibliographies for their writing projects, but this would have saved him a lot of time in college (assuming the internet had existed when he was in college).
From Lifehacker:
When I was in college, my least favorite part of writing research papers was figuring out how to write the bibliography. Citing sources is tedious and can get confusing if you have to work in a handful of different styles. This week I came across a Chrome extension that I wish I had in college that handles the heavy lifting for you, at least for websites.
Called Cite This For Me, it automatically creates website citations in APA, MLA, Chicago, or Harvard style with a quick click on its icon on your browser’s toolbar.
. . . .
When you click on the toolbar while you’re looking at that fabulous article you’re going to reference in your paper, you tap the icon and a window pop up where you can toggle between the different styles, and copy and paste the style of your choosing into what is likely a magnificent research paper you’re working on.
Link to the rest at Lifehacker
My wife recently finished her M.Ed. and most of the research for her papers was done online through official periodical services. All of them included an option to “save a citation” (not simply a bookmark) and when you were done, you chose which form of citations you wanted, and then you simply downloaded the text as your bibliography, all properly formatted.
I’m 50 but the 23-year-old version of me cried.
P.
I can get weepy at the thought of the compilers of the citations for the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), wrangling all those little slips of paper by hand. Just because there were no computers at the time doesn’t mean I don’t recognized the injustice of it all.
We used RefWorks when I was in grad school. I then gave up because it didn’t play well with various .gov documents and letters, and just kept a bibliography list by hand.
Ah, another ‘there’s an app for that!’ shiny thingy …
Should be interesting to see how someone ‘lazy/in a hurry’ manages to goof things up. 😉