2. Plagiarism and Copyright
Citations and Bibliographies: RefWorks

College students today are extremely busy, often juggling family, work, and school responsibilities, and properly formatting research can be a time consuming activity.

For that reason, Westminster College subscribes to for all of its students, faculty, and staff. RefWorks is an online database that you can use from anywhere over the Web to store and organize your research.

Using RefWorks, you can directly send (or "export") citation and other information directly from many Library databases into your own, personal RefWorks account. (For some databases, for books, for websites, and for other materials, you may have to copy and paste the information into your RefWorks account yourself.)

Your RefWorks account is bottomless, meaning that you can store as many citations as you like, and they will remain in your account throughout your career at Westminster . This is important, because you may find that you use important works that you have found in more than one research project.

When you are writing your research paper, putting together a project, or preparing a presentation, you can use Write-N-Cite, a small software plug-in for MS Word, that will work with your RefWorks account and automatically create and properly format your bibliography according to the style that you choose.

RefWorks isn't fully automatic, however, and there will be times when you have to supplement the citation information it contains with things like the specific page numbers you are quoting, the database from which you retrieved a full-text article or ebook, and the date that you retrieved online information.

For this reason, it's important that you become familiar with the citation style (APA, MLA, or other) that your instructors ask you to use so that you can ensure that the bibliographies and in-text citations that RefWorks creates for you include all the necessary information. You remain responsible if you turn in a research project with a flawed bibliography.

To learn more about RefWorks, view the Giovale Library's Introduction to RefWorks or schedule a consultation with a librarian to learn how to use it. Then visit our RefWorks page to create your free, personal account, and login to get started. Remember to Ask a Librarian if you have any questions.