The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 9, 2006, Friday

Copyright 2006 The Chronicle of Higher Education
All Rights Reserved
The Chronicle of Higher Education

June 9, 2006 Friday

SECTION: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY; Pg. 29 Vol. 52 No. 40

HEADLINE: Toss Out the Index Cards

BYLINE: VINCENT KIERNAN

BODY:
Index cards are out of the question when Peter B. Woodbury writes a research paper. Mr. Woodbury, a research associate in the crop- and soil-sciences department at Cornell University, is an environmental scientist whose work centers on developing computerized models of such phenomena as climate change and the effects of air pollution.
Since he relies on environmental data reported in a myriad of others' studies, any paper he writes includes hundreds, if not thousands, of citations of papers and books. Using word-processing software to manually compile and format the footnotes and references is impractical, he says.
Instead, Mr. Woodbury, like an increasing number of researchers, has turned to a computer program. The software he uses, called EndNote, along with a similar program called RefWorks, dominate the academic market for citation software.
"EndNote is very helpful," says Mr. Woodbury. When he works with online databases, "it lets me feel 'on top of the literature,'" he says. Using EndNote, he has created several databases of scholarly references, each containing thousands of entries on a specific topic. He has annotated the entries so that he can easily retrieve those that, for example, report measurements of how plants respond to ozone.
And when he is ready to produce a report or paper, the program effortlessly spits out the citations and bibliography.
At first glance, the problem of formatting references may seem trivial and hardly deserving of a new category of software. But footnotes and bibliographies are notoriously time consuming to format by hand because of arcane rules that vary from one journal to another. One journal, for example, might require that journal titles in bibliographies be italicized, while another might require that they not be.
That presents a word-processing hassle for professors, especially when a scholar wants to submit a single paper to journals that follow different style rules. It is also a nightmare for undergraduate and graduate students, who wrestle for hours or even days with creating proper citations for term papers and dissertations.
The citation software takes care of that. It creates correctly formatted footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies, frequently using information downloaded from online databases, so the user never has to type in details like the author's name or the title of the book. (The user still has to enter some information by hand, such as the page of a quotation.)
And changing the style of citations is a matter of using a mouse to select one from a menu of all available styles, a boon to scholars sending their papers to multiple journals.
"This is almost the single most productive tool you can learn as an academic," says Christopher J. Mackie, a doctoral student in history at Princeton University who also teaches a course for the university's information-technology department on the use of citation software. The software can save three to four hours in preparing a term paper, a week for a master's thesis, and several weeks for a dissertation or book manuscript, says Mr. Mackie.
And college librarians say that the software can help discourage plagiarism as well as make researchers' lives easier. Libraries increasingly are purchasing site licenses to bibliographic software. Other colleges do not purchase a site license but make software available at a steep discount.
"They're the wave of the future," says Karen N. Eggleston, an assistant professor of economics at Tufts University who uses both EndNote and RefWorks. "It just makes so much sense to have software to handle it all."
How They Work
EndNote and RefWorks each work in tandem with a user's word-processing software. The research programs are configured to work most closely with Microsoft Word, although other word-processing software also can take advantage of some features.
The citation software maintains a database of all books, articles, and other materials that the user may want to footnote, often compiled as the user trolls databases and online library catalogs. When the user wants to insert a specific footnote while writing a paper, he or she instructs the citation software to deposit it into the paper. When the paper is completed, the citation software also creates a bibliography, reflecting all material cited in the paper, and tacks it onto the end of the paper.
"It saved me hours and hours and hours on my thesis," says Karen Karniol-Tambour, a Princeton senior majoring in international studies whose thesis on peoples' perceptions of others' political views included 198 footnotes and a 15-page bibliography. "I didn't even spend a minute doing it."
The companies that publish the two citation programs follow different business models. RefWorks, by RefWorks LLC, is sold principally to institutions, which then provide access to students and faculty and staff members. (Individual subscriptions are available for $100 annually.)
RefWorks operates through the Web, and there is no software to install, so users can get access to their RefWorks databases and create papers on any computer that has Internet access. But some librarians say that RefWorks is not always able to handle formatting of arcane scholarly materials, such as those in historical archives, and its Web-based operation occasionally makes it slower than EndNote.
EndNote sells its software to both institutions and individuals, either directly or through campus stores, and the software is installed on the user's computer. A separate copy, costing $239.95, is required for every computer that will run EndNote.
Thomson Scientific, which publishes EndNote, plans to offer a Web-based version of the product, called EndNote Web, later this year. The company says it will be available free to all colleges that have purchased site licenses for distributing EndNote or ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson's Web-based portal to scientific journals. It will not be sold to individuals.
Early versions of EndNote were released in the 1990s, while RefWorks has been sold only since 2002.
Wide Usage
Thomson Scientific declined to say how many institutions have site-license agreements with it. "EndNote is the most popular citation-management solution here in the U.S. and internationally," the company said in a written statement.
RefWorks is now in use at about 650 institutions, says Tina Long Moir, the company's vice president for business development, marketing, and sales. RefWorks costs an institution $3,000 to $17,000 annually, depending on its size, she says.
Most often, that money comes out of the library's budget rather than the institution's information-technology budget.
That makes sense because librarians have a powerful desire to reduce plagiarism, whether willful or accidental, by making it easy for students and faculty members to correctly cite sources of information, says Audrey B. Wright, a librarian at Princeton.
But the modest price is too much for some cash-strapped libraries. The library at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology spent about $6,500 for a one-year site license for EndNote, which allowed students and faculty members to download personal copies of the software free. The library will allow the license to expire at the end of June, since anyone who wanted a copy will have had ample opportunity to get one, says Dal Symes, the library's director. The money will be useful in paying for the ever escalating prices of subscriptions to scholarly journals, he says. In a year or two, when the university has new students and professors in need of EndNote, it may buy a new site license, he says.
Choosing a Program
Several librarians said there are few hard-and-fast guidelines for students and faculty members who are choosing citation software.
Of course, a shopper should make sure that the program is equipped to handle the particular citation formats that the user will need. But as a practical matter, both EndNote and RefWorks probably offer all the formats that a scholar or student would require. EndNote recognizes more than 2,000 different sets of scholarly style rules.
Both programs also operate on both Macintosh and Windows computers. (But bad news for open-source aficionados: Neither EndNote nor RefWorks will function on the open-source Linux operating system.)
Even if an institution has a site license only for RefWorks, an individual user could opt to pay for a personal copy of EndNote. But many librarians feel that RefWorks is easier for novices to master.
"Sometimes we suggest that people give RefWorks a try before they invest in EndNote," says Virginia A. Cole, a Cornell librarian.
Ms. Wright, the Princeton librarian, says she offers the same advice, and always recommends that undergraduates in particular start with RefWorks. That's because they are more likely to be working on a paper from a variety of computers for example, several public computers in the library over the course of a semester. RefWorks' Web-based setup is particularly helpful to them, she says.
If a RefWorks user begins to feel constrained by that program's limitations, he or she can then get a copy of EndNote. It is easy to move data between RefWorks and EndNote, Ms. Wright says.
Not Everyone Is a Fan
Although faculty members seem to have no qualms about using citation software themselves, some do question its use by students. These professors argue that, far from reducing academic misconduct, the software might make it easier for students to find and cite references to articles and books without reading them.
But librarians at institutions that offer the programs say they are unaware of any increase in plagiarism tied to citation software. Several undergraduate and graduate students say that relying on citation software in concert with online databases encourages them to read and cite material that they otherwise might not have included in their work.
Some faculty members think the software may be overkill in introductory undergraduate composition courses, in which students are likely to cite only a handful of sources, says John T. Butler, director of the Digital Library Development Laboratory at the library at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, which has a site license for RefWorks.
And a few faculty members have tried the software for their own research and then gone back to tried-and-true manual methods. One is Lowell Turner, a professor of international and comparative labor and collective bargaining at Cornell. He says his graduate research assistants urged him to use RefWorks, but he found that the program couldn't quickly or easily import a career's worth of bibliographic material, in a variety of formats.
"It was really more trouble than it was worth," he says. He has gone back to fashioning citations with his word processor as he writes. "That's always worked pretty well for me and pretty quickly," he says.
But Mr. Turner says that a young scholar, starting from scratch, could find the software useful because the scholar would gradually collect citations and not have to import old references, as Mr. Turner needed to.
"Maybe it's just teaching old dogs new tricks," he muses.
He's not alone. Even though legal scholarship follows exceedingly detailed citation rules that seemingly would be well suited to a computer program, legal scholars as a whole avoid citation software, says Kevin M. Clermont, a law professor at Cornell. Legal scholars often cite arcane documents from around the world, which citation software has difficulty handling, he said.
"It's by light years not sophisticated enough to handle our problems," he says.
Rodney Yancey, a spokesman for Thomson Scientific, says the company is considering adding support for citations in legal scholarship to EndNote, but he says he does not know when that will occur.
Applause From the Trenches
People with such experiences and concerns are in a distinct minority. The software appeals to a wide range of students and scholars. Since November 2003, almost 11,000 people at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities have registered for RefWorks, and they have stored a total of 570,000 references on RefWorks' servers, says Mr. Butler. The university's Twin Cities campus has about 50,000 students and about 3,100 faculty members.
For all that, Minnesota's library pays $12,500 annually for RefWorks, or "about a buck an account a year," he says.
Half of Minnesota's registered users are undergraduates, 37 percent are graduate students, 5 percent are faculty members, and 3 percent are researchers, he says.
To many of the users of EndNote and RefWorks, the availability and convenience of the software represent a rare opportunity to use information technology to actually save time and work less. For example, Amil L. Lindsay, a mechanical-engineering graduate student at Tufts, found the traditional home-rolled citations just too much for his thesis. "I was just overwhelmed with keeping track of references," he said. "I just had stacks and stacks of hundreds of articles on my desk."
He learned how to use RefWorks in January, and by semester's end he had used it to put together his master's thesis. If RefWorks were no longer available free on the campus, "I think I would buy it," he says.
Mr. Mackie, the historian and librarian at Princeton, says scholars should embrace the software, for their own use as well as for their students'.
"Time is a precious commodity for academics," and researchers who don't use bibliographic software put themselves at a competitive disadvantage, Mr. Mackie says.
"I don't care which one you're using," says Mr. Mackie. "You should be using one of them."