Faculty Adopt RefWorks@Lehigh Research Manager

Library and Technology Services now offers a new, feature-rich solution for managing citations for articles, books, reports, scores, web sites, and other resources. The solution is RefWorks: Your Online Research Management, Writing, and Collaboration Tool, a web-based service fully integrated with Lehigh’s library systems and Microsoft Word.

RefWorks is accessible anytime, anywhere and can be used in collaborative ways for class work or by research teams. The Lehigh user name and password will allow access to the LTS subscription from off-campus, just as it does for the other library resources. In addition, users need to set up a RefWorks account, where a scholar’s personal reference library will reside. To begin using RefWorks, please visit the Database Finder page for RefWorks here. This site includes the on and off campus URL’s and a link to the Tutorials and Help.

RefWorks user Tina Richardson, Professor of Counseling Psychology, noted that: “RefWorks has improved my efficiency immensely with regard to conducting literature searches and creating reference lists. It is tremendously helpful when advising students regarding their research and sharing citations." Since the start of RefWorks@Lehigh in May 2007, over one hundred accounts have been set up. Graduate students constitute about half of the current users at Lehigh. To date over 50 faculty, graduate students, and staff have attended the twelve hosted RefWorks webinars offered by LTS.

RefWorks@Lehigh is part of the campus-wide writing and information literacy initiative and includes features such as “Write-N-Cite,” a citation formatter compatible with Microsoft Word, and “Ref Grab-It,” a way to store bookmarks. It has numerous convenient features; for example, citations selected from the library’s research databases and Google Scholar may be directly exported to RefWorks. Citations stored earlier in EndNote can be easily exported to RefWorks. Free RefWorks Fundamental Webinars are announced often. Users may also consult Client Services librarians for help.

-- Jean Johnson

Article posted August 2007
 

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