Bibme

Posted Friday July 20, 2007 by John Gunders in |

This is pretty interesting, and I wish it had been around when I was an undergraduate with a habit of returning books before I’d copied out the bibliographic details: an online bibliography generator.

Apparently designed as a semester project by students at Carnegie Mellon, it draws on data from Amazon, LookSmart FindArticles, Yahoo! News, and CiteULike Academic Papers, displays the results in MLA, APA, or Chicago style, and allows you to download them as RTF.

It’s not perfect: on my test run of the four academic titles that happened to be on my desk, it found all four but didn’t know the author of one of them, and apparently doesn’t have a way of distinguishing between an edited collection and a monograph. It also put a space in the wrong place for MLA.

I don’t know that it will take over from Endnote, and similar applications, but it’s pretty bloody impressive all the same.

Your Comments

  1. Jason Wilson writes:

    Hey John – have you tried Zotero? It’s a Firefox plug-in that does a very similar job, and also scans webpages and amazon entries etc for bibliographical details. It works a treat and… I am a total nerd.

    Posted: 20 07 2007 - 10:30 | Permanent link to this comment

  2. Ben Tucker writes:

    Hey, one of the developers of BibMe here. Thanks for the shout-out! Can you let me know more about the space in the wrong place for MLA. I’d love to fix it.

    Thanks!
    Ben Tucker

    Posted: 20 07 2007 - 11:06 | Permanent link to this comment

  3. John Gunders writes:

    Hi Ben, thanks for your interest (I’m not sure how much of the formatting will survive Textpattern’s rendering). Here is one of the entries generated by your site: you might notice “London” is preceded by a single space and followed by a double space—should be the other way around.

    Lash, Scott M, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society). London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1994.

    I’m really impressed with the site: keep up the good work!

    Posted: 20 07 2007 - 13:05 | Permanent link to this comment

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