If you’ve been applying Bluebook rules recently, you might have thought to yourself “I bet a computer could do this so much more quickly and easily.” And you would have been correct! So I offer here a couple of notes about using technology to help with citation-formatting, especially for journal articles and books.
- Google Scholar now has automagic MLA, Chicago, and APA-style citations. From the Google Scholar Blog, “To copy a formatted citation, click on the “Cite” link below a search result and select from the available citation styles.”
- Did you know there are specialized browser and desktop tools to help manage citations? The UCI Libraries has a great chart that compares features of “Bibliographic Management Software.” (Bluebook is supported by all of the examples on the chart!) (The Law Librarians here are big Zotero fans. It’s fantastic to look through articles and, every time you see a good one, just click a button to have your browser plug in the title, author, and other relevant details into a list of citations. When you’re done with the research, you highlight the citations you want for a bibliography and export them in whatever format you want.)
We are truly living in the future.