On EasyBib

October 9, 2018

In a hurry? Here’s the bottom line. You may use a citation generator, but be careful! You cannot blame faulty documentation on a faulty tool.

A lot of students like to use EasyBib, and it is a really helpful application. But users should remain mindful that EasyBib is code, and code does not take the place of your critical sourcing skills. Take the example of one of my favorite online texts, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics hosted at Nothingistic.

When the URL for the Table of Contents is pasted into the EasyBib MLA style helper, here’s what you see:

The Article Title matches the source: The Nicomachean Ethics

And the URL matches what we pasted in.

But where does that website title come from? The Doctrine of the Mean: Chs. 1-12?

If we look at the web page we are sourcing, there is nothing to support the website title.

The website title appears in the upper right corner, nothingistic.org.

EasyBib has prompted the user for help with Publisher and Date of Publication. For our purposes the publisher could be identified as the domain, which would be the same as the website title, but MLA discourages redundant info, so the publisher info could be left out. Or if you see a copyright mark on the page, you could list as publisher the name associated with it. For date of publication we could click into the link at nothingistic that says “book details” and see a date when the web publisher “last visited,” which would work in this case. Remember, we are not working with the book; we are working with the web page, so the book date is not needed.

But let’s just say the user’s curiosity is not aroused by the mismatch between website titles or remains indifferent to the information that EasyBib is asking for. Just say the user presses the button for the unchecked and incomplete citation. Here’s what would come out:

In this case EasyBib has been misused; the user has just pasted and clicked, nothing else.

On the other hand, suppose the user checks the results that the application provides and completes the information that EasyBib asks for:

And then clicks the button for a citation:

Not bad, EasyBib! Not bad at all. Thanks!

Based on the “8th Edition MLA Practice Template” we could insert the translator’s name right after the title, but that would have to be done by hand.

One last thing: if the user takes a minute to google the discarded website title, Doctrine of the Mean, Chs. 1-12, the results are interesting. The title refers to one of “The Four Books” in the Confucian tradition (a work that is also provided at nothingistic) but the term Doctrine of the Mean also names a teaching of Aristotle that is found in The Nicomachean Ethics. So, calling Aristotle’s work The Doctrine of the Mean is not completely without meaning (no pun intended), even if it is not the actual title.