The 3Rs: Research, referencing, and…arrrgh

Anyone who has done any type of online research certainly can understand the feeling suggested by “arrrrgh.” You find an article and scan it. “Yes,” you think, “this is perfect.” So, you print it out and later realize that you didn’t add the URL and date/time of retrieval for your reference page. Or, you did remember you would need the info, but you had to laboriously write it out because you didn’t set your browser print preferences to add it automatically. Or, perhaps you bookmarked it instead of printing it but still can’t find it because, if you’re like me, you have about a kazillion unorganized bookmarks that you plan to get around to organizing but don’t because…well…you know. In either case (print or bookmark) you definitely experienced the third R of education: arrrrgh!

Fortunately, there are some web services that can help. This post will only go over a few of the many capabilities that each tool has - I’m hoping you will test it out and add your comments so we can all benefit from each others’ experiences with these tools.

First Looks
The three services I checked out were CiteULike, Connotea, and Magnolia. While not technically the same, all three have interesting capabilities that can make your research experience (and your students’ experiences) more pleasant.

CiteULike has strong citation and referencing capabilities. When you run across an interesting journal article or web site, you simply need to post it to CiteULike using the bookmark tool provided. Information captured includes author, title, and other citation information as well as comments. If you’re looking for a service that will help you compile that bibliography or reference page, then this will definitely do the trick. See my personal Tek Trekker CiteULike library for an example. The service also provides you with an opportunity to create a group and have members adding citations to the group area. However, the group request needs to be approved - I requested a group 2 days ago and am still waiting for approval. The one thing I don’t like about CiteULike is that when you click on the link to add the citation, it opens in the window of the article you are reading. Not very user friendly. I found myself opening articles in two separate tabs so that when I opened the CiteULike citation window, I could switch over to the other tab to see the article. [update May 24: our group in CiteULike has been approved and is open for you to test out!]

Connotea helps you add citations to articles, but it doesn’t include fields for author or some of the more complicated citation information. On the other hand, it has wonderful capabilities for commenting on citations and the layout of the page is quite easy to read. I created a personal connotea library called Tek Trekker that has the same two citations as my CiteULike library so you could compare them. Connotea has a group feature as well (and you can great groups easily and instantly). I created a test group for us called Web2Learning. Please feel free to check it out and add to it to test the service and this feature of the service.

Magnolia is probably the friendliest service of the three. It has fewer citations options than CiteULike and Connotea, but it is a much stronger group / collaborative tool than either. Like both of the others, it has a little bookmarklet that you can add to your browser tool bar to easily mark pages. But, by far the thing I like best is that I can go merrily about my research, bookmarking as I go for my own personal library and then copy relevant bookmarks from my library to any groups I belong to. That means, in short, that I don’t have to bookmark things twice - once for the group and once for me. Anyway, if you are wanting to create group resources more than you are wanting to create a reference page for your research document, then this is the service for you. Check out my personal magnolia bookmarks … and please feel free to test out our group Web2Learning library while you’re at it. This blog will certainly be a better resource if you get involved and add to it and the other sites I’ve linked to in the blog roll in the upper left side of this window.

Teaching and Learning Ideas
Idea 1 In the past, I’ve asked students to create annotated bibliographies of their research for their research projects. I do this because I want them to practice with APA formatting and with summarizing and analyzing text. The first time I did this assignment, I had the students turn in individual bibliographies. Then, I thought it might be helpful to all of them if they could see each other’s annotations so we switched to Google Docs. I can see that magnolia would be a much much better tool for this type of activity if I wanted to emphasize the collaborative aspect of this assignment in a more friendly way than can currently be achieved with Google Docs.

Idea 2 - Share your ideas by posting a comment! I look forward to hearing from you.