Update on RefWorks Citation Management

In the fall 2004 issue of News U Can Use, we informed you that York University Libraries, in partnership with other Ontario university libraries had licensed RefWorks, a user-friendly database management program that stores and organizes citations and formats bibliographies. RefWorks is available without individual charge to all York faculty, students, and staff. To date, over 2000 York community members have activated accounts. RefWorks can import citations from periodical indexes, e-journal vendors and library catalogues. It can format bibliographies automatically in a wide variety of bibliographic styles, and can even add references to an essay as you write in Microsoft Word: RefWorks automatically embeds citations in the body of the essay, and builds the bibliography during the writing process. For more information about setting up an account, click on Footnotes and Bibliographies on the Libraries' homepage.

The Libraries are continuing to enhance online support for RefWorks users. We post new information regularly on the RefWorks and RefWorks FAQ pages to address concerns and challenges that York RefWorks users have encountered. RefWorks users are encouraged to contact their liaison librarian with any questions they may have about using RefWorks.

Continued improvements to the software are planned and these will be publicized as they become available. Recently, RefWorks introduced a number of changes and enhancements to improve functionality. Users can now globally edit reference types and globally delete records with specified author names, descriptors, or journal names. Folder creation and management has been improved. In RefWorks Online Help, users now have access to an expanded list of Frequently Asked Questions and an expanded list of Data Vendor import instructions to help facilitate moving citations between periodical indexes and their RefWorks account.

For a complete list of changes to RefWorks, see the notes for the December 2004 Release.

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