By Bob Streff

UW-Platteville subscribes to RefWorks for all students. I have listened to debates on both sides regarding its usefulness. Some say that students don’t learn the proper manuscript style when RefWorks creates it for them. And sometimes, there are problems importing into word processors. On the upside, it can save students time by automatically filling in the information required by the different styles.

• There are some useful features of RefWorks that I never hear in the debate:
• You can open RefWorks and cut and paste portions of text into RefWorks; and you can place notes about the quote in another section. 

Refworks will also add the citations within the paper.

These can be very helpful tools during the research and writing phases. But during the final draft phase, there is no substitution for using the most current style manual.