This is the most exciting citation generator I've played with in a while. I've been using sites like Easybib.com for years, but BibMe, which was developed this spring by Information Systems students at Carnegie Mellon University seems simpler to use and more extensive in its scope than most other tools around. It automatically generates MLA-formatted citations to your computer in .rtf format (indentation and everything!). Alternatively, you can also export to APA and Chicago styles.
Just go play with it. It seems pretty fantastic.
Chicago style appears incorrect
They seem to have some of the explanations incorrectly marked, or they are not using the most recent editions of the sources for the documentation format.
The explanation for the APA shows the date information at the end of the reference.
When you look at the explanation of Chicago style, they appear not to be following the 15th edition of the manual (2003). For example, they show parentheses around the date in what they refer to as the "Bibliography" entry; however, in both the Chicago "Reference" format and the "Bibliography" format, the year has no surrounding parentheses. See section 17.27. Further, the 15th edition provides different formats for Author/Date citation systems (similar to APA) and traditional formats (similar to MLA). The examples they provide are similar to the references format of the 15th edition. They are not similar to the Bibliography format although they do imply the title should be Title Case; the Reference format uses Sentence case. I believe the page number inclusion in an in-text citation is also inaccurate; see section 16.109 of the manual.
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rdr
Thanks. I will pass your
Thanks. I will pass your comment along to the developers. Maybe they can make the fix.
I tried entering data
I made an entry through the program. They order is correct in the entry, so it looks as though the tab explanations are the main problem.
I noticed that they did not sentence case the title in APA. They add a comma after the first author if there are only two authors. Some of this can somewhat be fixed in coding, but other parts would need to be tweaked by a person--for example how to handle when to capitalize.
They might also create a CSS style such as <p style="text-indent:-2em;margin-left:2em;margin-right:10em;line-height:1em;">bibliography goes here</p> to simulate the hanging indentation in the preview. I use that in Blackboard for my examples when students are doing annotated bibliographies.
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rdr
MLA & APA
You know, it boggles my mind how long it's taking folks to get this citation generator software working right. I experimented with EndNote back in the day as well as Refworks, and always came to the conclusion that the interfaces were just too cumbersome to make it worth the effort. Even Zotero's interface isn't a no-brainer. I guess it's one of those things that sounds very simple in theory, but is excruciatingly difficult to implement.
I'm a bit surprised Word hasn't taken the leap and added a built-in citation system of some sort. "Hey, I see you're writing a works cited page, can I help?" kind of thing. I can't imagine it'd be THAT hard to make a set of macros to handle it.
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