A message from our founder
Hi, I’m Erin, the founder of Reference Quest, the fun, interactive way to create high quality citations in minutes.
You may be wondering why I was inspired to create Reference Quest. I work as an academic librarian. Every day, undergraduate students come to our reference desk, asking questions about their citations. In universities across the world, citations are big business. If your citations are not appropriately laid out according to the assigned format, you are going to struggle to succeed. Professors grade harshly, and can raise allegations of academic dishonesty, or plagiarism, if a student’s citations are not complete correctly. So citations, and reference management, are big business for university libraries.
So, citation formatting is important to students, and to professors. We know this. But my colleagues and I kept getting the same questions, over and over again, from students across campus. They wanted us to help them with their citations. So we developed PDF quick study guides which were intended to show students examples of the most common citation types, like books and journal articles in all of the major styles.
Although these guides were written thoughtfully by professional librarians, and involved a lot of hard work and promotion on the part of our library staff, we continued to get questions from students every, single, day about how to properly format their citations.
So, I tried something else. I started to refer students to an online service from Purdue University, called the Online Writing Centre, or OWL. OWL is an interactive website, which allows students to view a table of contents or navigation menu on the left hand side of the screen at all times. This menu helps students quickly identify the type of material they are trying to cite, and offers concrete examples of each type of citation. Furthermore, OWL offers sample papers, sample citation lists and similar resources to help students learn.
Even still, OWL did not stop student questions, and didn’t really change the type of questions we received. Students simply did not feel confident about the citations they were creating. The University of British Columbia has access to more advanced research citation management tools, like RefWorks, Endnote, and Mendeley, but they aren’t really designed for undergraduate student use, and can be fairly complicated interfaces to teach, on TOP of needing to teach how to format citations!
After thinking about this for several years, and being frustrated that I didn’t have a better tool in my arsenal to assist my learners, I came up with the concept of Reference Quest. Reference Quest is a simple concept: to walk students through the creation of an accurate citation, from start to finish.
Students will visit the UBC Okanagan Library’s webpage (library.ok.ubc.ca) and be greeted with a “Do you need help with your citations?” box at the bottom of the page. They’ll then be greeted by a beautifully designed front page asking what format their citations should be in, with 4 initial options: APA, MLA, ACS AND IEEE. From there, the decision making will branch off, to ask questions that are relevant only to that citation style. First, what are they trying to cite? A book? A journal article? A youtube video? And so on.
As they progress through the decision tree, they will enter the information from their item. One thing that makes Reference Quest better than our competition is that students ONLY enter the information required for their citation style. We will never ask them to provide unnecessary or confusing information. This way, they are learning what information needs to be in an APA citation, and not what could be required in ACS.
Once they’ve completed all the steps, a full citation will appear on their screen which they can cut and paste into their reference list!
We here at Reference Quest really feel this will be revolutionary to students and librarians. Students will gain independence and be able to practice using constructivist techniques. Librarians will be freed up to assist with truly complicated reference and citation questions (for example, how do you cite a snap from snapchat! It happens!).
We hope you’re excited about Reference Quest, and ready to help us reach our design phase. Please explore our site further to learn more about my background, to get a peek at the initial design might look like, and more!
You may be wondering why I was inspired to create Reference Quest. I work as an academic librarian. Every day, undergraduate students come to our reference desk, asking questions about their citations. In universities across the world, citations are big business. If your citations are not appropriately laid out according to the assigned format, you are going to struggle to succeed. Professors grade harshly, and can raise allegations of academic dishonesty, or plagiarism, if a student’s citations are not complete correctly. So citations, and reference management, are big business for university libraries.
So, citation formatting is important to students, and to professors. We know this. But my colleagues and I kept getting the same questions, over and over again, from students across campus. They wanted us to help them with their citations. So we developed PDF quick study guides which were intended to show students examples of the most common citation types, like books and journal articles in all of the major styles.
Although these guides were written thoughtfully by professional librarians, and involved a lot of hard work and promotion on the part of our library staff, we continued to get questions from students every, single, day about how to properly format their citations.
So, I tried something else. I started to refer students to an online service from Purdue University, called the Online Writing Centre, or OWL. OWL is an interactive website, which allows students to view a table of contents or navigation menu on the left hand side of the screen at all times. This menu helps students quickly identify the type of material they are trying to cite, and offers concrete examples of each type of citation. Furthermore, OWL offers sample papers, sample citation lists and similar resources to help students learn.
Even still, OWL did not stop student questions, and didn’t really change the type of questions we received. Students simply did not feel confident about the citations they were creating. The University of British Columbia has access to more advanced research citation management tools, like RefWorks, Endnote, and Mendeley, but they aren’t really designed for undergraduate student use, and can be fairly complicated interfaces to teach, on TOP of needing to teach how to format citations!
After thinking about this for several years, and being frustrated that I didn’t have a better tool in my arsenal to assist my learners, I came up with the concept of Reference Quest. Reference Quest is a simple concept: to walk students through the creation of an accurate citation, from start to finish.
Students will visit the UBC Okanagan Library’s webpage (library.ok.ubc.ca) and be greeted with a “Do you need help with your citations?” box at the bottom of the page. They’ll then be greeted by a beautifully designed front page asking what format their citations should be in, with 4 initial options: APA, MLA, ACS AND IEEE. From there, the decision making will branch off, to ask questions that are relevant only to that citation style. First, what are they trying to cite? A book? A journal article? A youtube video? And so on.
As they progress through the decision tree, they will enter the information from their item. One thing that makes Reference Quest better than our competition is that students ONLY enter the information required for their citation style. We will never ask them to provide unnecessary or confusing information. This way, they are learning what information needs to be in an APA citation, and not what could be required in ACS.
Once they’ve completed all the steps, a full citation will appear on their screen which they can cut and paste into their reference list!
We here at Reference Quest really feel this will be revolutionary to students and librarians. Students will gain independence and be able to practice using constructivist techniques. Librarians will be freed up to assist with truly complicated reference and citation questions (for example, how do you cite a snap from snapchat! It happens!).
We hope you’re excited about Reference Quest, and ready to help us reach our design phase. Please explore our site further to learn more about my background, to get a peek at the initial design might look like, and more!
What makes Reference Quest stand out?
Reference Quest works constructively, focusing on helping students teach themselves to create citations, rather than relying on librarian instruction. Due to the critical volume of students on campus, and low staffing levels in libraries, it is simply impossible for each student to have a one-on-one interaction with a librarian for citations. Reference Quest offers students the opportunity to learn in a self-guided, online environment, supported by resources developed by professional librarians.
While other companies in the marketplace, like Zotero, Refworks, Endnote, Citethisforme and others, help students by creating citations, they do not include the learner in the process. Many services simply let students include a link to the resource, and then will analyze and autofill the required fields. This will result in frequently accurate citations, but students will have learned nothing. Furthermore, services like Refworks will capture mistakes and typos made in metadata - without the user recognizing the core elements of a citation, they may trust an incorrect result and lose marks.
Reference Quest changes all of this. Our process is transparent, and walks students from start to finish through the development of a citation!
While other companies in the marketplace, like Zotero, Refworks, Endnote, Citethisforme and others, help students by creating citations, they do not include the learner in the process. Many services simply let students include a link to the resource, and then will analyze and autofill the required fields. This will result in frequently accurate citations, but students will have learned nothing. Furthermore, services like Refworks will capture mistakes and typos made in metadata - without the user recognizing the core elements of a citation, they may trust an incorrect result and lose marks.
Reference Quest changes all of this. Our process is transparent, and walks students from start to finish through the development of a citation!