Citation optimization
Right now, the problem for me with RefWorks is that it does far too many things automatically. At my university, we have our own rules of the citation which have to do with the rules of Dutch grammar. e.g. We write titles and subtitles as sentences, meaning that only the first letter of the first word per sentence is capitalized. The exception is of course for names, place names, historical events, etc. (each of these depending on the local spelling & grammar rules). While we want as much information as possible to be automated, it's very unhandy to automate the capitalization as well, because this is sometimes dependent on the context of what language we write the essay on and (for students) who's the course we are following. My idea is as follows: when importing a new citation to RefWorks, let the software automatically guide you through the registration of the citation process. First, it will ask you to clarify the citation style you wish to use (in my case Turabian 7th edition, but APA could be an alternative), then it will let you go through the various other elements: title, subtitle, volume, publisher, etc. Of course, the details of the source are already preconfigured, but the user can then individually choose to check whether titles or terms in the title are capitalized or not without interference from the software. The software only guides you through the relevant aspects of the citation and allows you to edit any errors or inconsistencies at your discretion. At the end of this process, it can show the sample citation so that you can do one last check-up to determine whether everything's in order before saving the citation. Now you know that your citation is configured to your personal needs. It requires some nitpicking, but only once for every title instead of numerous times every time you recite the same source.
The next problem relates to synchronizing RefWorks with Word, in my case. When I've already synchronized my RefWorks database and then choose to cite one of my sources, I can't edit errors that I notice. Rather, I have to go back to the manager on the website, edit the specific source citation in question and then resynchronize with Word. Worse yet, the already cited sources aren't corrected, nor can I use the saved versions in the drop-down list (they are the very citations containing the errors, and when resynchronizing with RefWorks, these versions remain unchanged). Instead, I have to delete the old citations in my written document and manually insert the new citations. I find this strange, because the old citation and the new one, should have the same ID-number, correct? My request would be to alter this function so that already established footnotes and bibliography citations also get adjusted.
My final gripe is with the fact that we do double work when exporting citations. We choose the citation style in which we wish to export our sources, but then also choose our citation style in RefWorks. This problem is partially created by the online databases which we cite from and I would recommend keeping the option to choose your citation style in RefWorks, but it gets even more mind-boggling when you can additionally choose your citation style from within the Word add-on. There are various possible alternatives to this problem, one which I've tried to argue for in the above paragraph, but I have two other ideas that might work as well. One: let RefWorks be the database that deals with raw data of the source to be cited, allowing you to choose your citation style from within the Word-add-on. Two: Do the entire generation of the source citation (citation style, language, URL, title, upper casing/lower casing etc.) from within the RefWorks managers and use the Word add-on simply as the engine which synchronizes with the database to the most up-to-date version.
This may have been quite a read, but let me know what you think.
This was handled offline.
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John commented
Cool post, I always dreamed of writing voluminous texts, thanks that during my studies https://studyfy.com/write-my-discussion-board-post write my discussion board post, so I never tried to write myself