I can't tell you how excited my wife was to find this site. She was almost as excited about the prospect of never having to carefully format another bibliography as she was to be able to point me to a site worthy of posting at Download Squad.
Ottobib is a site that allows you to simply type in the ISBN number of a book that you need to reference, then choose the style that the bibliography must be written in, and it spits back your fully formatted bibliography. Simple as that. Yet another tool that solves a simple problem in a simple manner. In fact, I would think someone could make a killing writing a plug-in for Word that did exactly this. Hmm...
Tags: automatic bibliographies, AutomaticBibliographies, bibliographies, easy references, EasyReferences, freeware, ISBN, ISBN number, IsbnNumber, references
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Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsGerard HarrisonSep 20th 2006 12:13PM
This site seems to work a little erratically. On several searches, it left out the city of publication, inserting the word "City" as a placeholder. On others, it messed up capitalization. You might be able to use it to show you the correct form for an MLA, or other cite form, but I wouldn't count on it for content.
BrettSep 20th 2006 11:56PM
This would be sweet if it worked for more than just books.
EngGuruSep 30th 2006 11:56AM
Oh come on, this is nothing.
First, have you actually tried it? The "bibliography" produced by this thing is horrible -- which makes sense, because who knows what formatting irregularities there are in the databases that the tool is pulling from. If a student handed in the results of this tool thinking "a computer did this, it must be right," they'd be in trouble.
Second, this mechanism is already built into some of the Web-based bibliographic software out there. It is nothing new -- and any software that doesn't already incorporate it can easily do so via a service like ISBNdb.com that has an API.
Third, since when does anyone do research where all their sources are books? This site as a standalone tool is useless. Fun, good proof of concept, but useless by itself.
jonathanOct 2nd 2006 3:04PM
hey, you're right about ottobib, it's not working very well. but it does get its data from isbndb.org, and whatever else it can't find from amazon. the bibliographic databases out there are not good enough yet for this service to be solid. i am working on more ways to get more information.