Friday, September 7, 2007

RefWorks for bibliographies

Modern nonfiction books seem to require extensive bibliographies. RefWorks is the best solution I've found to maintaining and generating bibliographies.

How it works:

RefWorks is an online database for all your
bibliographical entries. You can access it from any
Internet connection.

After you sign up for an individual account at
RefWorks, you simply enter your bibliographical
information in RefWorks from any Internet connected
computer.

(I enter everything that I come across while
researching a manuscript... books, interviews,
magazine articles, journals, films, images... )

When it comes time to write your manuscript, Install
the RefWorks utility Write-N-Cite on
your word processor.

Once Write-N-Cite is installed, go ahead and write
your draft, as usual.

To insert a citation in your draft, open Write-N-Cite
and scroll down the list of citations in the
Write-N-Cite window. Click 'Cite' to insert a
citation.

Write-N-Cite installs a tiny snippet of MS Word code
in your manuscript.

When you are finished with your draft, follow the
instructions on the Write-N-Cite page to automatically
generate your bibliography.

In practice, I've found it very simple and reliable.

RefWorks website.

Detailed Write-N-Cite description.

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