A common question we receive on our help desk is, “How do I cite a blog?”  Blogs are increasingly becoming a mainstream source, and students are often finding the information they need for their papers in this relatively new type of source.

To help, we created the blog format. You can cite a full blog article, a blog comment, and even interviews and product reviews.

Blogs are information sources that you should treat with some care.  There are thousands of blogs that are written by professionals and experts, but there are thousands more that may not be. Obviously blogs are becoming a very important medium for information transfer, so to categorically deny this source as a respectable citation medium would be the wrong thing to do. Just take pains to double check the quality of what you’re citing.

And let’s be honest: this applies to all sources you use. Always confirm the quality of your materials when you do your research.

Easy as ABC: Web Apps for Students

“This one is a little bit of an old school pick, but it’s an indispensable resource for every student.”

Thanks guys!

Our first foray into widgetry: we bring you minibib.

What’s minibib?

minibib is a quick and easy way to let your users start citing sources directly from your Web site. Selecting a source from the widget brings them back to EasyBib.

What’s the use case? Well, every now and then we get an email from a public library or a school library asking if they can add a link to EasyBib from their resources page. We’re always thrilled when we get these emails because we know librarians are our hardest audience to please, and know that if they’re linking to us it means they appreciate our work (to all the librarians out there- thanks :) ).

So we thought, hey, instead of just a little old link, can we spice it up a bit?

From that little question grew the idea of minibib. Take a look and let us know what you think.

Hi everyone,

As the new design settles in with our users, I wanted to make a few blog posts about some of the new features we have on EasyBib.  The first of these will cover ISBN AutoCite.

Some of the most common sources cited on EasyBib are books. On the old version of EasyBib, book information had to be entered in element by element. Now, given that the bibliographical information in books are already organized by ISBN number, it was only a matter of time until we were able to marry a database full of these numbers with our service.  To cite a book via ISBN number, you first need to go to our book form.

Once there, you just type in your 10 or 13 digit ISBN number (often found on the inside cover of the book or on the back, near the bar code).

Then, click Autocite, and your information should soon pop up.

I’ll admit: we do not have every ISBN in here (many out of print sources are not in our database)- but we’re working hard to collect more data and bring this technology beyond books - to periodicals, web sites, and more.

One last note - MyBib Pro users used to have access to a service called “InstaCite”, which allowed them to search books based on titles and authors. While the ISBN Autocite database is much larger than our old InstaCite database, we do not yet have search by title/author - we will though, very very soon.

EasyBib, this is Murphy.

Murphy, meet EasyBib.

Let me introduce you to what is called Murphy’s law in the computer space.

Murphy’s law basically says that if something can go wrong, then it most likely will.

You have also probably heard of so called “bugs” before when your geeky computer friends (People like me! ;)) talk about programming?! Well, bugs and Murphy’s law hang out at bars at night and plot where they could cause confusion, and then they will!

What am I referring to? I am referring to our launch last Friday.

In some respects it all went pretty well, but I am sure some of you noticed that you could not log into your accounts or it gave you another weird error when you tried or some accounts had sources/lists missing when you got in.

The reason for those issues is that we did not just change the design when we relaunched EasyBib (Version 5). What we did over the past six months is actually pretty unique in the web space. We started from scratch.

Most of what we did is not directly available to all the people using EasyBib every day. For example, we did a lot of reorganization of the bibliographical data which allows us to expand our service more easily in the future.

So even though you just see the new design, all of you will benefit from the background changes in the long run. We will be able to shift from 2nd into 3rd gear with the website and accelerate on new features and all the stuff you have been asking for over the years, and all the new ideas you can come up with.

As for last Friday, my good old pal Murphy (we go back over 10 years) made sure it did not go all as smooth as planned. So of course I don’t want to shift all the blame on poor Murphy and the bugs. There’s plenty of space here for us to improve as well and let me assure you that we will!

All the issues have been resolved, I talked to many of you guys through the helpdesk and let me thank you one more time for your patience and all the best wishes you guys sent in. If you still experiencing any of said hiccups, make sure to get in touch us.

As always, thanks for using EasyBib.

Stay tuned for more - you ain’t seen nothing yet!