Article: Student Prints

An extraordinary new product called WriteNote is set to introduce a whole generation of students to PC-based bibliographic and reference management. STEPHANIE MARSHALL and DAVE WOODWARD explain how.

The market for bibliographic and reference management software is dominated by three products which can be found the world over: EndNote, ProCite and Reference Manager. Although they have different strengths and appeal to slightly different sectors of the market, they’re all extremely powerful products, capable of managing a whole career’s worth of references.

Now ISI ResearchSoft has come up with an extraordinarily good idea: a product similar in concept to these heavyweight programs, but adapted for the student market. WriteNote looks set to be one of the big success stories of 2003.

WriteNote is a web-based research and writing tool for students to organise their references. It gives students the tools they need to take full advantage of library subscription resources and properly cite for attribution.

Ingenious in concept, WriteNote is actually hosted by ISI ResearchSoft and available 24/7 for local and remote access, including distance learning. It is licensed to institutions through a CHEST agreement from Adept Scientific. Through a browser-based interface, students can discover online library resources, annotate and save web pages for citing, organise references in a personal library, and format papers with footnotes or a bibliography.

WriteNote is easy and intuitive, an essential feature for students. Context-sensitive ‘Quick Tips’ appear throughout WriteNote to guide students in how to identify and collect relevant material for a paper, how to organise reference information, and how to cite references and create a bibliography or footnotes.

Students can also use a ‘Research and Writing Guide’ for an introduction to the elements of writing a paper.
WriteNote is available on the web browser toolbar so there are no URLs to remember. A web browser plug-in presents students with links to reference sources approved by each academic institution, and captures the reference data.

The student searches the library resource, finds a reference and uses ‘Get Biblio’ to send the citation data to a personal web library. WriteNote extracts citation data that the student will need to cite the reference properly. However, unstructured sources such as web pages can also be selected as the reference source, and in such cases, a record is created with the relevant fields requiring completion marked as such.

Students can annotate and save web pages during the discovery phase for easy access in the writing phase. The Annotation tool includes highlights, shapes, figures and Sticky Notes. Web pages can be saved locally (for personal use) complete with all original links, images and annotations.

The student can then access the WriteNote library in Microsoft Word to cite references. A WriteNote toolbar enables the students to find citations in their WriteNote libraries, connect directly to personal web libraries, format a bibliography or footnote, and change the bibliographic style in the document. Output styles format the inserted citations and the bibliography according to specific rules.

Of course, a student continuing on to graduate level studies can use professional products such as EndNote, ProCite and Reference Manager for ongoing reference storage. But as an introduction to PC-based reference management, WriteNote looks set to be taken up around the world.

Who is WriteNote for?
WriteNote is aimed fairly and squarely at students, at subscribing institutions, to build the skills they need to write research papers. WriteNote guides students in collecting and citing references from electronic and print sources, while reinforcing the principles of citation attribution (and thereby discouraging plagiarism). WriteNote points students to their library resources, provides helpful tips and tools to highlight, mark and annotate web pages, and adds references into their personal reference collections. As students’ bibliographic needs become more advanced, these references can be transferred easily to the desktop tools EndNote, ProCite and Reference Manager.

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