It is easy to take pot-shots at EasyBib. They make it too easy, as I have suggested many times over the years. They have an imperfect citation generator which frequently churns out incorrectly-formatted citations (especially in auto-citation mode). They give wrong advice in their guides to citation styles. They have produced many flawed add-ons which attempt to enable “Smarter Research. Powered by You,” such as their Research and Essaycheck services (both of which were abandoned some years ago; the links here go to the Internet Archive records). Their grammar and spelling checkers need to be used with great care – but that goes for many, probably most, possibly all grammar and spelling checkers.
[Among my various blog posts whch mention EasyBib, Getting it wrong…, Not so easy does it, APA mythtakes and Not such a wise OWL are particularly pertinent here.)
As I say, EasyBib makes it easy to shoot ’em down. I probably would not have bothered this time, except that, clearing my inboxes (long overdue), I came across an EasyBib blog post which chimed (indirectly) with thoughts in a pending article of my own which I had got stuck on. I think the EasyBib article has unblocked my thinking – not this post but possibly the next.
The article in question is Typing or Writing Notes: Which Is Best? posted by EasyBib User on 9 January 2019. EasyBib User is – was – a frequent contributor to the EasyBib blog, posting at least 5 times under this name between April 2018 and January 2019. This particular post appears to be her last. (One of the five posts includes an author name as well as the pseudonym, so I think I can call her “she.”)
An EasyBib user this blogger might be – but it seems clear that she has not used EasyBib to compile the Works Cited list for this post. Or maybe she did, maybe it is EasyBib itself which is responsible for the errors in the list.
There is not much to ponder in the article itself, although the writing style is sometimes convoluted, perhaps even more convoluted and confused than mine. This, for example:
Notes quickly typed out are sure to still be legible when you go back to study them, while notes that were quickly written down by hand may not always be tidy enough to read back, especially if you know that you have less-than-impeccable handwriting.
I wonder if EasyBib User was paid by the word? There are quite a few unnecessary words here – and it seems to be the self-awareness of your handwriting style rather than the handwriting itself which seems to impede legibility.
But it is the short list of Works Cited that exercises me. There are just three items, and the formatting of each of them is inconsistent with the other two. We do not know which referencing style was used, although I strongly suspect it was MLA. For certain, it is an author system (and not an author-date or footnote system), and the list at the end is headed “Works Cited,” both suggesting MLA or a similar system. It is not MLA8, at least not MLA8 used correctly, since the one URL includes the protocol “https://” – and it is not MLA7, given that there is no indication of the format, “Web” or “Print.”
It may be best not to worry too much about the exact style guide used. The main concern is consistency.
There are three citations in the text (in the order that they appear):
“Studies, such as this analysis from Scientific American, have shown that …”
“… as a 2014 study by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer demonstrated.”
“… which another study by Dung C. Bui, Joel Myerson, and Sandra Hale also showed.”
These are linked, more or less, to these works in the list of Works Cited:
Works Cited
Bui, Dung C., et al. “Note-Taking With Computers: Exploring Alternative Strategies for Improved Recall.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 2012.
May, Cindi. “A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop.” Scientifica American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/
Mueller, Pam A., and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. “The Pen Is Mightier Than The Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Keyboard Note Taking.” Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1159-1168.
Let’s take them one at a time, in order of appearance.
May
“Studies, such as this analysis from Scientific American, have shown that …”
May, Cindi. “A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop.” Scientifica American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/
The first thing that stands out is that there is no mention of May’s article in the text. In the text, the article is attributed to Scientific American, not to the author. This is poor citation practice and it is unhelpful too. It is not too unhelpful in a short Works Cited list such as this, but imagine a Works Cited list with many entries; it could take a lot of close reading to match the magazine cited in the text with the magazine buried in the list of Works Cited.
The second thing is that this magazine is recorded as Scientifica American in the list of Works Cited.
As already noted, if this is MLA8, then we do not need the https:// – and nor do we need the URL to be italicized. I wonder which of the 7000 citation styles available in EasyBib Plus does italicize its URLs?
And finally, no date is given for the article, although it is clearly there on the webpage, June 3, 2014.
Mueller and Oppenheimer
The second item cited is the study published by Mueller and Oppenheimer:
“… as a 2014 study by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer demonstrated.”
Mueller, Pam A., and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. “The Pen Is Mightier Than The Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Keyboard Note Taking.” Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1159-1168.
The link in the text takes us to the Sage Journals site and an article which is paywall-protected, note the padlock in the Access Options button:
Did EasyBib User access the article on the Sage site – or at least, this abstract? Did she find the full article in the print version of Psychological Science? One has to wonder, did she access it at all (or did she rely on the very full summary provided in Cindi May’s article)?
What we do know is that (1) if she used the online version, EasyBib User has not included the URL in her reference and (2) whether she accessed the article in print or online, EasyBib User has not given us the DOI.
We can also see that if she is using MLA, EasyBib User has not used SagePub’s citation generator, which shows:
In common with the mainstream style guides, MLA8 advises “When possible, citing a DOI is preferable to citing a URL” (MLA Handbook, 48) – but again, we do not know which citation style EasyBib User is using. Assuming that EasyBib User is using EasyBib.
Bui, Myerson and Hale
And so to the third citation:
“… which another study by Dung C. Bui, Joel Myerson, and Sandra Hale also showed.”
Bui, Dung C., et al. “Note-Taking With Computers: Exploring Alternative Strategies for Improved Recall.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 2012.
The hyperlink in the text takes us to a site which is no longer there. Thanks to the wonderful Internet Archive, we can still retrieve Bui’s paper as posted on the Bui’s University’s website (Washington University in St Louis, Psychological & Brain Sciences Department). It is available, freely or paywalled, on other sites too, including the publishing journal, the Journal of Educational Psychology. The paper was published online in 2012 (as shown in the PDF I downloaded from the university website), and in print in 2013. The print version includes volume and issue number of the journal, the online version does not – but as it is (presumably) the online version which was used by EasyBib User, those details may be irrelevant.
But both versions include the DOI, and again, EasyBib User’s citation does not.
My last cheap shot
The question remains: does EasyBib User use EasyBib to create her citations?
If she does, then EasyBib is failing her – or she is failing to use EasyBib properly.
If she does not use EasyBib, then how can she claim to be EasyBib User?
This was the last of EasyBib User’s five contributions to the EasyBib blog. Did she stop writing of her own accord – or was she dropped? Maybe she realised that EasyBib is not what it cracks itself up to be?
Just out of interest, I entered the URL of her blog page into the EasyBib citation generator. This is what it came up with:
User, EasyBib. “Typing or Writing Notes: Which is Best?” EasyBib, Chegg. 1 Jan. 2020. www.easybib.com/guides/typing-or-writing-notes-which-is-best/
Never mind the inversion of her name, where did that date come from? The post online is dated 9 January 2019. Crazy!
I don’t have to aim cheap shots at EasyBib, it brings itself down.
Unblocking the flow
When evaluating sources, one of the considerations is whether the author cites the sources used – and if so, how well? Does the reference or works cited list conform to academic or disciplinary conventions? Is the list complete, are the references complete and internally consistent?
Work which claims to be academic but which includes errors of various kinds may be deemed untrustworthy, and this includes errors of citation and referencing. I won’t expand on this here, but this is the thinking on which I got stuck, my own article as mentioned right at the start of this post. I think my thinking is unblocked. Stand by for my next post.
Works Cited
Bui, Dung C., et al. “Note-Taking with Computers: Exploring Alternative Strategies for Improved Recall.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 8 Oct. 2012, doi:10.1037/a0030367.
EasyBib User. “Typing or Writing Notes: Which Is Best?” EasyBib Blog, Chegg, 9 Jan. 2019, www.easybib.com/guides/typing-or-writing-notes-which-is-best/.
May, Cindi. “A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 3 June 2014, www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/.
MLA Handbook. 8th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2016.
Mueller, Pam A., and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard.” Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 6, 23 Apr. 2014, pp. 1159–1168., doi:10.1177/0956797614524581.