A couple of days ago on iPadApps4School.com I wrote about RefME’s iPad app. You don’t have to have an iPad to take advantage of the service RefME offers. RefME is a service designed to help students create citations and organize bibliographies.

The free RefME iPad and Android apps enable students to scan the barcode on a book, periodical, CD cases, and many other media cases to have a citation formatted for that item. RefME provides more than 6,500 citation and bibliography formats for students to use. If your students don’t have an iPad or Android device, they can still take advantage of RefME’s service by simply logging into the website and performing a search for the book, periodical, or website that they need to cite. If RefME finds the item, a citation will be created that students can import into their accounts.

If your students do have iPads or Android devices they can take advantage of the barcode scanning capability of the RefME apps. After creating a RefME account students create their first projects in RefME. A project is essentially a folder for the citations that students are going to create for a paper. Students select a project name then add a reference to it by scanning the barcode on a book or periodical. When they have finished scanning all of their references (they can also add references manually) student can export their lists of citations to Evernote, email the list, or create a Word document of citations on the RefME website.

Applications for Education
RefME could be a great tool for students to use to keep track of their reference materials as they put together research projects. The option to manage multiple projects could be helpful to students who are working on multiple research projects at the same time.