Creating a Bibliography
Hello! I’m going to show you how to create a bibliography within Discover@Bolton, the Library’s search engine, where you can search for books, journal articles and other resources for your assignments. So, let’s do an example search for “healthy eating” and children and click Discover. You will then see a long list of results including journal articles, books, and others listed under Item Type. To create a bibliography from selected results, you need to create a Refworks account by clicking Refworks login at the top right of the screen.
If you already have a Refworks account that you usually access through the databases A-Z, it’s produced by the same company, but the two products are not compatible at the moment, so it still a good idea to set up a new account here. So to create an account click on No account? Sign Up here. Use your university email and a password of your choice. I already have an account so I’ll sign in. You can see my name there.
So I’m going to save some journal articles. I select the ones I want by clicking on the folder icon by each article. The articles selected show in the folder at the top of the screen. If you didn’t have a Refworks account or hadn’t signed in that would be a temporary store only and you would lose your results when you closed the browser. But as I’m logged in, they are saved permanently. I click on the folder icon to access my Refworks account. You can see the items that I just saved, plus previously saved resources. I can leave them in the middle or sort them into specific Collections. The My Collections function allows you to create folders where you can store and organise your results, so if you had several assignments in progress simultaneously, you could create a folder for each one and organise your results.
The feature I particularly want to show you is the Create Bibliography function. I’m going to select the three items that I’ve just saved, so imagine that your completed your assignment and want to create a bibliography or reference list from the articles that you’ve used. You can then get Discover@Bolton to do the work for you! Click on the “ icon and Create Bibliography. I have mine set to Harvard British, but if you were a psychology student you would select APA, or OSCOLA for law. You can see now, that the articles are presented in the Harvard style, you can copy that to clipboard and paste it into your assignment in Word.
Note that you will need to tweak the style given to conform to Bolton Harvard, such as, not using the full name or putting brackets around the date. You can see that there is a bit a variation in the way the data is presented, some give the full first name, some just use the initial as required by Bolton Harvard. You don’t need to use the long URL given, delete right back to the first forward slash after serialssolutions.com. The URL http://bolton.summon_serialssolutions.com tells your tutor that you have sourced the article from library resources. Having to tweak it a bit is much better than having to laboriously type it all out!
So to repeat, select the resources that you want, click the Create Bibliography function, copy to clipboard, paste into your assignment and tweak into Bolton Harvard style!
Have a look through the other tools that are included in Refworks. I’m sure you will find the Create Bibliography function very useful.
If you need any further help come and see us in the Library, phone on 01204 903094, email or contact your subject librarian.