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RefWorks Introduction

Using RefWorks

What is RefWorks?
RefWorks is a citation manager that can help you organize your research by storing citations for the articles you find. You can then use those citations to automatically generate your bibliography, formatted to whatever citation style you choose.

You can even sync your RefWorks account with Microsoft Word to drop in-text citations into your document. You can even include it as an add-in with your web browser to create citations from websites. RefWorks can be easy to use and very helpful, but takes a little bit of practice to be familiar with.

Four reasons to use RefWorks include the ability to:

  1. Gather, store, manage and share references or citations.
  2. Generate bibliographies in numerous citation formats such as APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.
  3. Store references online and have accessibility to them wherever internet access is available.
  4. Creates more accurate citations. (RefWorks can be used to replace other citation machine sites such as Citation Machine, BibMe, and EasyBib). 

This is the login screen for RefWorks. After you create your account, save those login credentials. You will always see this screen first when using RefWorks, even when exporting citations from databases to RefWorks.

STUDENTS:

When students are registering for a Refworks account:

YES: first.last@go.mnstate.edu

NO: StarID@go.minnstate.edu

*Check for activation code in junk mail if not in inbox.

 

Adding References

There are several ways to add references into Refworks.

Begin in the Main Navigation and click on +Add:

Upload a Document – these are documents from your own computer files. Example: PDF, PPT, Word Doc. They can also be uploaded with drag and drop anywhere on the All Documents page or Import a Reference page.

Import a Reference – allows you to import reference files from other reference managers, from legacy RefWorks and from other sources.

Create New Reference – Search for a title or DOI, review the results and save the ones you choose, or manually add all reference meta data. When selecting Create new reference a new pane will appear on the right.

You can search for a reference or create it yourself.

  1. Enter a title, or as much of the title as you can.
  2. When available, click on the lightning icon button title_locate.png in the Title field to have RefWorks match the title with an item in the library. This button is also available after you enter a value in the DOI field, which appears for most reference types.
  3. RefWorks displays possible suggestions at the bottom of the pane. If you select one, RefWorks completes the title and fills the fields with information from the library. You can later review or edit fields.
  4. To keep the reference, click on Save. The reference will be added to your Last Imported Folder.
  5. If no match is found, you can create the reference by typing in the metadata yourself and clicking on Save.

You can save references or articles, including full text (if available) from any website into RefWorks using the Save.

You can also add references by searching in linked library catalogs and publicly available databases. Search results can be imported into your account with the click of a button.

When you are doing your searching in any of the library's databases there will be an option to export the citation to RefWorks. A couple of examples would be:

 A successful import will generate a message similar to the following:

User-added image

To export references, navigate to the page or folder of the references you would like to export. Click on Share in the Main Navigation, then Export references. Select the relevant options and click on Export.

RefWorks Advanced User Guide