Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Annotated Bibliographies with SiteFast
Learn how to create annotated bibliographies using SiteFast. Follow this detailed guide to easily generate citations in APA, MLA, or Chicago styles.
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APA, MLA, Chicago Citations In-Text Reference Citations with CiteFast (Full Tutorial)
Added on 09/25/2024
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Speaker 1: To get started using SiteFast, first create your free account. Click on the Create Account tab in the upper right and fill in your name, email address, and a password. About sharing your email address, I've never received any spam from SiteFast. After your account is created, you'll be back on SiteFast's homepage with a welcome message and your first project ready to be created with the name Biblio1. You can change that name later. Now, choose your citation style, APA, MLA, or Chicago. Let's do APA first. Note that it is already selected. Next, let's select the source type, web page, book, journal, including print and online journals, web image, newspaper, online video, including YouTube, and 12 more types revealed by clicking on the More down arrow. Let's do a web page. Included with the web page designation is what some call a web article or website. When we click on web page, we're given two options, manual and autofill. To use autofill, all you have to do is paste in the full URL of the web article you found. For example, here's an article entitled, America's War on Drugs Has Failed. This program might be the solution. We copied the URL from the browser window and carefully pasted it into SiteFast, being sure there are no extra spaces before, after, or in the middle. Now, click on the Search icon. SiteFast fills in some information, but as you can see, the citation is incomplete. We have to fill in the author's first and middle initial. Do not put a period after the initials. SiteFast will do that for you. And the author's last name. If there's more than one author, click on the Add Author tab. Notice that, as we fill in the blanks, the citation on the right changes automatically, taking shape in real time. Next, we have to find a publication date, if one is given. Looking back at the original, we see that this article was published on May 7, 2015. So, we go back to SiteFast and fill that in. Now, look at what SiteFast is telling us about capitalization of the article's title. In APA, only proper nouns, the first word of the title, or the first word after a colon or period in the title, are capped. So, we make those changes to the title that we pasted in. Next is format. Since this article is part of a larger site, Huffington Post, we leave the first radio button checked. Next, we have to answer the question, is the source material likely to change over time, such as happens on wikis, blogs, and other social media? The answer is no, so there is no need for a retrieval date. As you can see, the URL has already been captured for us. Excellent. Let's save our work before going any further. There it is. Now, since we're creating an annotated bibliography, let's click on the pencil edit icon and add our annotation. Scroll down and click on Add Annotation. You can expand the text field by clicking on the hatch lines and pulling to the right, but it is probably best if you already have the annotation written out so that you can simply paste it in. That's what I will do. Now, we click on Update. Voila. We've created the first entry for our annotated bibliography. Our last step is to click on Export to Word and watch the magic happen. A Word document is downloaded to our computer. And, when we open it up, we see a perfectly formatted APA citation with the annotation beneath it. Outstanding. To add additional sources and annotations, simply click on Manage Bibliographies. Scroll down and use the drop-down menu to select the bibliography you wish to work on. This is where you can rename the project if you wish. So let's give it a specific name that will help us identify it in the future. Type in the new name and click on Rename. Done. To add more sources, click on Open. Now, all you have to do is, as they say in the shampoo business, lather, rinse, repeat. First, choose the source type. This time, let's do a journal article from the library, just to show how the citations are different. Let's try Autofill first. Here's the library article we'll be using. We copy and paste the full title. Slowly learning the hard way, America's War on Drugs and Implications for Mexico. And then we click on CiteFast's search icon. CiteFast found our article, so we select it. And, as you can see, the entire citation is instantly and automatically filled out for us. All we need to do is click on Add Annotation and paste in our pre-written annotation. After clicking on Save Annotation, this time when we export to Word document, we see that our annotated bibliography has grown. The two sources are in alphabetical order, in the correct font and point size, with the correct spacing, and correct everything. Now, if Autofill cannot find your article, simply go back and forth from article to CiteFast, copying the information from the library page to the CiteFast boxes. For example, this time let's add another journal article, but one that does not trigger Autofill. Here's an article we found in the library entitled, Winding Down the War on Drugs. When we paste it into CiteFast, the article is not found. No problem. We click on Manual Entry. Now we very carefully copy in the required information. First is the author's first and middle initials, both M. Then her last name, Sanchez Marino. We have to type in her name, not copy it, because the library page has all caps. What format? Since we're using an online library, we must select Online Electronic. Year published? Let's see, that's 2015. The full article title is, Winding Down the War on Drugs. When we paste it in, once again we're warned that we have to use lowercase in APA. So, we make those changes. The journal title is a simple copy and paste, Harvard International Review. We put it in. We can also quickly type in the volume number, 36, and the issue number, 4. Page numbers are entered with a hyphen with no space on either side of the hyphen. In this case, page numbers are 35 through 39. Then we need either the DOI or the publisher's URL. We scroll down the article's library record, and we see that there is no DOI assigned. So, we click on that journal's title, and on the next page, we're given the publisher's URL. We copy and paste that into CiteFast. Now, let's add our annotation. After the annotation is added, let's export the whole thing to a Word document again. As you can see, the manual method took a bit longer, but the results are the same. Perfect citations and a well-formatted, annotated bibliography. Follow the same procedure for either of the other two styles. They're just as simple. CiteFast. As simple as it gets. Oh, and did I mention it was free?

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