Most citation styles—Chicago, MLA, APA, etc.—now recommend that you include information about the online source from which you retrieve electronic articles. RefWorks will include this information, if it’s available from the article source. If it’s not automatically available, you can paste it in youself, by editing the records. (When you edit a record, you can select the citation style. Each citation style has a green check mark next to the fields that should be included in a citation in that style. Click on the green check mark for more detailed information about the field)
Many online indexes automatically include online information (URL, date of access, database name) in the fields they export with citations. Some don’t—most noticeably, EBSCO—which is still working on this transfer of information.
To have this information about online resources included in RefWorks bibliographies, you need to choose source type: electronic instead of source type: print. There are two ways to do this:
- This choice is available at the edit level for every record. Select the records for which you’d like to display electronic information, then click edit. The Source Type menu is above the author field near the top of the display. Choose electronic, then click on save reference at the bottom of the edit screen.
- You could also set electronic as the default. From the Tools menu select customize. Select electronic from the source type pull down, and click on yes. Be sure to click on save at the bottom.
If you change the default, all bibliographic records will show the electronic information, as if the article itself is electronic full text—even if only the citation was electronic! For those articles that you read in paper or microfilm format, you need to change the individual record back to print source type (see step 1).
In summary, although the electronic information is often already in the exported RefWorks record, you need to change the record’s setting—either by changing the individual record’s setting or the default—to have it display.