I laughed out loud when I saw this.
My son borrowed this as a warning to his students in their undergrad writing class:
Trust but verify the results of automatic citation creation tools [Bonnie J. M. Swoger]
“Almost all academic databases these days will allow you to export a properly formatted citation (APA, MLA, etc.) for a book or journal article within that database. This is a wonderful feature for undergraduates that saves a lot of really annoying formatting. It is especially helpful for eliminating the annoyance of re-arranging author first names and last names and putting in appropriate punctuation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always come out perfectly. For example, the citation database Scopus regularly produces a citation indicating that an article is “Available from www.scopus.com” which is completely incorrect. Just the citation is available from Scopus, the full text of the item is found elsewhere. So in my library instruction sessions I regularly encourage students to double check the results of these citation generators (in databases, in web services like EasyBib and in programs like Mendeley and EndNote).”
Stephen
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This is a great post that we need to make available to college and university students, as well as instructors.
I cannot tell you how many students come up to me (I work for Humber College Libraries) with their citations and references “done” by a citation generator, and are astonished when I suggest that they check and confirm the citation style rules for their references. Terrifying.
Hilarious. I can’t wait to see a paper with “Error: 404 Page not found” in the citations.