Referencing is basically a way to acknowledge the various sources of information which you use to research for various assignments. A student has to provide a reference whenever he or she uses someone else’s idea, work or even research. Now, first let’s get a general idea about how and why referencing tools play such an important role in academic writing. Referencing tools are a web source which allows the users to search for articles, theses, journal articles, and citations. Material on these toolscomes from various sources, including these;
- Professional society publishers
- Academic publishers
- Various Universities
- Preprint repositories
- Scholarly articles which are available on the open web
Now, the question arises why does a student prefer referencing tools for citations? One of the primary reasons is that the citations are provided for free of charge generally. Moreover, students find them easy to setup, especially if you already have an account. Like various other citation tracking services, these tools also tracks academic articles which is an added advantage for students. These days, you will not find any scholar who doesn’t think that referencing tools are the greatest thing since the slice of a bread. Even we agree to this sometimes, as these tools profile captures the maximum citation for us. Whereas, some scholars still prefer to do referencing manually, as they find this mode as the most accurate form. Moreover, while doing the referencing manually a scholar can always update himself, as doing referencing by these tools can have few mistakes as they are not that frequently updated. Given below is the information you need to gather in order to reference manually;
- Year
- Author
- Place of publication
- Date you viewed the source
- Title
- Type of Source
- URL
- Publisher
Let us tell you some of the points which you should consider before choosing your mode of referencing.
| Referencing Tools |
Manual Referencing |
| Retrieval of information from a large database giving comprehensive information |
The results are limited to the document at hand |
| Helps in effective utilization of time |
Consumes a lot of time of the students |
| Provides maximum results in minimum efforts |
Takes a lot of effort to achieve the accurate referencing |
| Commonality of acceptance in various educational educations |
Educational institutions do not rely completely on the outcome of manual referencing |
| Referencing Tools |
Manual Referencing |
| Information provided may not be specifically related to the documents |
Accurate relevance article produced by the scholar |
| Does not encourage students to work hard |
Improves students engagement |
| Is not acceptable in every University |
Correct outcome is accepted by every University |
| Encourages citing the documents without actual relevance to the task at hand |
Directly relevant to the paper created by the scholar |
The choice is always of the scholar, which method he or she wants to choose while referencing. Referencing tools can often miss the citations in a treasure-trove of all the scholarly material that has been stored in the institutional repositories. While we understand that doing them personally could be time taking, but it would be worth the effort as a scholar will be able to relate his work more efficiently with his effort put into the research.No matter what you are using, a scholar should always keep himself updated with the changes in different referencing styles, in order to customize the automatic citations.
Loved reading this Blog? Share your valuable thoughts in the comment section.
Add comment