APU Careers & Learning

The Case Against a Bibliography Generator

Students in concentrations that require extensive footnotes and bibliographies will know the pains of getting all your references correct. The tedious effort of tracking down the authors, editors, title, city, publisher, and everything else can become mind numbing. Regardless, students should avoid using bibliography generators such as eTurabian.

Here are the reasons why.

1. Students, especially undergraduates, must go through the pain of learning how to cite correctly without having to look up the proper format every time. The only way to do this is through repetition. Using a generator will stifle this process.

2. A generator will make you lazy. By going through your citations manually to ensure they are all correct, the student gives his or her work the personal check that his or her scholarly work deserves. While you may try to use a generator to get you started, you will easily fall into the habit of only giving the results a glance or worse, not checking them at all.

3. Generators are fallible. Providing an ISBN for a simple book in eTurabian seems to generate a useful reference. For example, 9780061146657 provided the following:

Clark, Christopher. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: Harper, 2013.

This is an accurate citation.

However, 9781843837473 provided the following:

Rogers, Clifford J., Kelly DeVries, and John France, eds. Journal of Medieval Military History. publication place: Boydell Press, 2012.

The tool was useful in making it obvious that it did not know the publication place, but it left out the fact that this if volume ten of the journal. A student pumping dozens of ISBNs for quick references could easily miss something so subtle.

While some may disagree with this case against bibliography generators, the reality is students, especially history students, will spend the rest of their lives reviewing and confirming bibliography references. Trying to automate the process introduces problems that can cause lower grades or worse, a loss of credibility.

Do not be the first person to blame poor footnotes and bibliographies on a bibliography generator.

By Scott Manning
Online Learning Tips, Student Contributor

Comments are closed.