Featured Library Supplier

Bibliographies: A Love Story Between Students and Teachers

“Ughh,” I remember thinking, “the bibliography part will be such a pain,” when I heard my high school teacher explain that our research paper would require at least 10 references. I knew why I needed to cite sources - so other readers could trace where information was derived. But why were the rules so complicated, with the italicizing, periods, colons, spacing and formatting? How should I format a source if I couldn’t find a data point? And what about sources that didn’t follow concrete guidelines? While writing a good paper was stressful, the bibliography was the part that caused me the most anxiety.

I wasn’t alone. My friend Darshan shared the same frustration, and in 2001 we founded EasyBib.com, a service that organizes bibliographic data and generates citations. Students loved the service – it helped them easily and accurately cite their sources, saving time and allowing them to focus on research.

Teachers and librarians, however, were more apprehensive. They feared such a service would negate the need to learn citations and were very vocal with their concerns. Today in 2010, as the internet has become weaved into teaching standards, we’ve seen EasyBib become part of the educational curriculums. While at first educators feared students would forget how to write citations, they instead began to see EasyBib as a place to encourage a cite-while-your-write research methodology, and as a tool to teach the importance of reference management by giving credit where due.

When we introduced features that educators in 2001 would have been uncertain of, like IBSN auto-cite, we found that today they quickly embrace it. In fact, we’ve seen a fundamental shift in attitude towards EasyBib - from hesitation, to acceptance, to embracement. We constantly hear constructive feedback from educators. For example, as suggested by the educational community, we introduced help fields to point out special rules based on citation styles, which students have found enormously helpful. We used to see EasyBib as being pulled by two different communities – students on one side, teachers and librarians on the other – but it slowly dawned on us that by responding to both we made the site stronger for everyone.

EasyBib is now nine years old. Looking back, we’ve been surprised at how far we’ve come – millions of students use service every month from all over the country. After numerous requests, we recently launched our School Edition service that caters directly to schools – ready with premium features, IP authentication, no advertisements, and a plethora of tools to be added.

It is ironic that the task that Darshan and I found most tedious, writing a bibliography, has now become our career. The strangest part is, we’ve really started to like them.

EasyBib.com offers the fastest way to create accurate, comprehensive works cited lists. 254,119,369 citations made to date. Now with Autocite: Cite books with just an ISBN number, and Web sites with just a URL.