REFWORKS

Refworks

For research in general, REFWORKS is a very efficient bibliographic manager that will ultimately same time for the researcher. Once all your bibliography data is imported, complete reference material is conveniently accessible in which REFWORKS even does the formating for you with respect to your style of choice - APA/Chicago. However, in order to really become proficient and realize all its benefits, you need to devote some time and energy into going through all the tutorials and 'experimenting with it' a bit. This time factor is further compounded due to the fact that you have to look up all the references and import them into REFWORKS if you want to use them. In other words, you have to build your 'library'. Although importing this data into REFWORKS is done efficiently, you still have to devote time and energy into looking each reference up through OSU libraries, JSTOR, etc. In short, this bibliographic manager is ideal for someone who is just beginning their graduate work. But for someone who may be in their last stages of graduate work and has all of their references on saved documents, the time investment involved in looking up and storing references may not be worth it, when one can cut and paste reference material from other saved documents. Lastly, like all digital tools, REFWORKS is convenient, but I contend there is value in researchers knowing how to do things for themselves (like formatting APA or Chicago style), rather than allowing, or depending on technology (which may not always be accessible/available) to do it for you.