BibMe
The new wave hitting the citation nation, BibMe, helps users create bibliographies by searching its own databases of books, magazines, journals, websites, newspapers, etc. I didn’t find that the articles BibMe is finding are the types of things that student researchers need to find–they’re all free articles available in other free online resources like the ever-popular FindArticles.com.
What would be really nice is if a service like this provided free citation building but incorporated into its search any proprietary databases the student chose to enter (e.g. here’s the URL, here’s my username and password). That kind of a tool would allow people to use everything they rightfully have access to on a subscription level, plus all of this freebie content, and create one bibliography to rule them all!
I worry that students using this service will simply be satisfied with "just enough" in terms of finding relevant articles for their research topics, instead of delving into what their libraries undoubtedly have available for them. But, what can we do realistically to help students understand the limitations of free services like that? I think therein lies our real goal and purpose–educating them about why free is not always better.
August 13th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Hi,
One of the BibMe developers here. I appreciate your concerns about limited selection of content coming from findarticles.com and citeulike.org (the two data sources BibMe uses for magazine and journal articles). We are exploring a number of possibilities for integrating with proprietary databases. Unfortunately, licensing terms from these providers are incredibly restrictive preventing us at this point from simply piggybacking on a student’s existing access (as in your example).
We are very interested in feedback from the library and education communities on how to make BibMe not just a quick bibliography maker, but a beneficial research and learning tool. If you or any of your readers have further input on how to achieve this, we would love to hear it.
Thanks!
Ben Tucker
BibMe.org
April 30th, 2011 at 12:29 pm
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