What is RefWorks?

On Monday, Rita and I attended a training session for RefWorks, a new web service that is available to all CUNY students, staff, and faculty. You can find it listed with all the databases on our Databases page.

So what is it? Rita and I will likely do a brief presentation on it at an upcoming ISD meeting, but for the moment here are the basics of what you can do with it:

• save your citations in a web-based service
• manually enter your citations (you type them in, one by one)
• automatically enter your citations from a database or catalog search (you export to RefWorks the citations you've saved within the database interface)
  
• generate a formatted bibliography from your citations (you first pick one citation style from one of the hundreds available)
• insert in-text citations as you type in Microsoft Word (requires a small plug-in for this bonus feature)

To get started, you'll need to set up an account. One great thing about the service: you can create as many different accounts as you'd like. Why would you want to do that? What if:

• you were working a group assignment or project and wanted to have a shared space to store citations
• you wanted to keep separate work-related citations from those tied to personal research needs

More details will be provided at an ISD meeting later this fall. It is also likely that the library will offer a special workshop for Baruch faculty to introduce them to this new tool.