Referencing is basically a way to acknowledge the various sources of information which you use to research for various assignments. A student has to provide a reference whenever he or she uses someone else’s idea, work or even research. Now, first let’s get a general idea about how and why referencing tools play such an important role in academic writing. Referencing tools are a web source which allows the users to search for articles, theses, journal articles, and citations. Material on these toolscomes from various sources, including these;
Professional society publishers
Academic publishers
Various Universities
Preprint repositories
Scholarly articles which are available on the open web
Now, the question arises why does a student prefer referencing tools for citations? One of the primary reasons is that the citations are provided for free of charge generally. Moreover, students find them easy to setup, especially if you already have an account. Like various other citation tracking services, these tools also tracks academic articles which is an added advantage for students. These days, you will not find any scholar who doesn’t think that referencing tools are the greatest thing since the slice of a bread. Even we agree to this sometimes, as these tools profile captures the maximum citation for us. Whereas, some scholars still prefer to do referencing manually, as they find this mode as the most accurate form. Moreover, while doing the referencing manually a scholar can always update himself, as doing referencing by these tools can have few mistakes as they are not that frequently updated. Given below is the information you need to gather in order to reference manually;
Year
Author
Place of publication
Date you viewed the source
Title
Type of Source
URL
Publisher
Let us tell you some of the points which you should consider before choosing your mode of referencing.
Referencing Tools |
Manual Referencing |
Retrieval of information from a large database giving comprehensive information |
The results are limited to the document at hand |
Helps in effective utilization of time |
Consumes a lot of time of the students |
Provides maximum results in minimum efforts |
Takes a lot of effort to achieve the accurate referencing |
Commonality of acceptance in various educational educations |
Educational institutions do not rely completely on the outcome of manual referencing |