Do you use bibliographic referencing ("citation") software? We do! We've tried various brands. Many students fell in love with RefMe as an easy tool for saving your references and inserting them into essays and assignments. We had some reservations, but in terms of ease of use, it had a lot going for it. So we were interested to learn that the bibliographic referencing tool, RefMe has now become CiteThisForMe.
- If you had a RefMe account, you can carry it across to CiteThisForMe. You may or may not find that the bibliographies you transfer across, have expired. (Mine were still there on my phone app, but not on the web version. Very strange!)
- If you're making a new account, however, it's a tad more confusing. Your registration is incomplete unless you sign up for Premium membership - with attached cost.
- Even more worrying - if you're a non-Premium user with a free account, your references are only saved for a week - really, not much use at all!
- Meanwhile, if you download the app, you can't login with your newly half-created free account. (You can if you've got a transferred-across account from RefMe. That's confusing too.)
It might be better to give up and go for Mendeley or Zotero. Seriously!
RefMe saves your references!
If you write essays or other assignments, you'll have been told to make sure you cite your references;
in other words, you must say which author you're quoting from. (Some people talk about references, some about citations. Same thing.)
There are many ways of citing your references - basically, they're different ways of formating your references so that they all give the necessary bibliographical information in a prescribed way. Here at RCS, we use the Harvard referencing style. (Click here to find a page about it. You'll have to be an RCS student or staff member to access this page.)
It's very handy to automate the procedure a bit, by using referencing software. There are a number of free apps available. RefMe is one of the latest, and probably the simplest.
How to use it? Sign up here. https://www.refme.com
- If you're citing books, go to your library catalogue or a website like Amazon or Copac.
- Highlight and copy the title of the book you've quoted from, and make a mental note of the date the book was published.
- Tell RefMe that you're creating a reference.
- Tell RefMe you're listing a book. A search box will appear.
- Copy and paste the book title in.
- Choose your book from the list of results that will appear - make sure the date is right. Click on it.
- Bingo! Your first reference.
- Once you've got all your references listed, you can export it various ways, eg as a Word document. That can be copied and pasted at the end of your essay.
Calm Your Inner Geek!
People might talk to you about Referencing, or Citations. It all sounds a bit obscure, doesn't it?
It's not hard, really. You need to keep note of what you've read, if you are going to 'reference' or 'cite' it later. (You might also to keep a list of things you mean to read later, so you don't lose track of those interesting titles...)
There are various apps out there. RefMe is the new kid on the block, but it's quite easy to use and seems to do the job, so you may like to take a look at it.
Anything that saves you racking your brains or rifling through notepads later, has to be a good thing, right?
We'll tell you about some other resources another day!
RefME - Have You Discovered It Yet?
We all have our favourite apps when it comes to regularly-performed tasks like referencing. Karen swears by Mendeley. Others use Zotero - both are freeware. (Some institutions offer institutional access to EndNote, which saves you money.) Diigo is great freeware for saving hyperlinks to the cloud.
So why try another? Well, we read a review of RefME in the Times Higher Education magazine, and it looks impressively simple. Most of us just want to keep a list of what we've read, and a way of pulling it into whatever we're writing, whether for footnotes, endnotes or a bibliography.
That's what RefME does. Find your book via the search box, and save it. Exporting couldn't be simpler - it provides a box of text for you to copy and paste into your paper, in a wide range of formats.
Do you use bibliographic referencing ("citation") software? We do! We've tried various brands. Many students fell in love with RefMe as an easy tool for saving your references and inserting them into essays and assignments. We had some reservations, but in terms of ease of use, it had a lot going for it. So we were interested to learn that the bibliographic referencing tool, RefMe has now become CiteThisForMe. 
