While we've been moving one million volumes here in Hale Library, RefWorks, my favorite citation management system, has been housecleaning and renovating. And they still have a few projects in the pipeline.
Shifting away from GroupCodes. Remember how you needed to enter that code for RefWorks or Write-n-Cite if you were off-campus? Not for much longer! Instead, RefWorks is using our account information to match us to our universities.
As part of this change, some of us at K-State received an email this morning saying that an account's username had been changed to our email address. If you are like me, you may have had a tiny little stress attack because you have more than one account. It's ok, you still do! The accounts that get this message haven't been used in more than 18 months. When I read the email more closely, the original account name is provided, so I vaguely remembered which one they were talking about. You should still be able to log into your other active accounts as you always have.
Wondering just how many RefWorks accounts you have floating out there? On the RefWorks login page, you can click on "Forgot Your Login Information." Enter your email address and you will shortly receive an email that lists all of the RefWorks usernames and passwords associated with that account. Please note, if you have a shared account (like with other researchers on a team), you may not see that one listed if someone else's email was used to create it.
Write-N-Cite 4--Yes, version 4! For once, Mac has leap-frogged ahead of Windows with Write-N-Cite, so you can update your Write-N-Cite if you are a Mac user, but have to wait a few more weeks if you have a Windows machine. I have WNC4 on my Mac at home and already love it. Remember the funky placeholders? Gone. Now you see the formatted citation right away. It also handles footnotes much better. Also, WNC4 is now a toolbar (Mac) or ribbon (Windows) in Word and once you've connected, it stores your account information, including citations, in Word. You can log out if you want, like if you share yoru computer.
Unfortunately, WNC4 wasn't released until after the updates to the computer labs at the beginning of the semester. This means that if you are in the InfoCommons, you will still use WNCIII on the Windows machines and WNC v.2.5 on the Macs this spring semester.
RefWorks 2.0 -- if you haven't played with RefWorks in the past 12-18 months, the whole interface is sparkling new. And orange, very orange. Still you can see your folders and references faster and even create subfolders. Plus, clicking on a link to a reference doesn't take you away from your workspace, it just opens a smaller window. Learn more by watching this demo of RefWorks 2.0.
With all of these changes, we're working on a new RefWorks help center. It's not ready for primetime, yet. Hopefully we'll be able to make it live in the next few weeks.
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