I've been using LibraryThing for quite some time, but noticed recently on book details pages a Citation field, with links to MLA, APA, and Chicago/Turabian. Clicking on the APA link to a random book, e.g. The Drinking Gourd, I found a well-formed citation, generated by OttoBib. It's obviously convenient to have this complete citation rather than having to piece it together yourself from author, title, and other information strewn about here and there. What surprised me was that it included place of publication, even though Amazon's failure to give that information has always been a source of frustration, and the source of the data was stated to be amazon.com. This could prove to be quite a remarkable timesaver.
Of course it's preferable in theory to always save the reference metadata, in case you need to generate a citation in another format. That's why my research group has standardized on CiteULike, which uses BibTeX. But if you're looking at something in LibraryThing and you're in a hurry, the OttoBib option saves a lot of steps.
Posted by rickdude on December 10, 2007
Tags BibliRefCite, Sites
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