How to Sign up for a RefWorks Account
If you do not already have a RefWorks account, you will need to go to the FAMU RefWorks webpage located here. Once on the page, click on the link labeled Create Account on the bottom of the pop up box that will appear..
This will open up a dialog box that will ask you to provide your FAMU email address, the login name that you would like to use, and for you to create a password. After you provide the information requested, a dialog box will appear that will ask you to give your name and your area of interest. After you have filled out the final dialog box, you will be directed back to the RefWorks sign in page. Sign in to your Refworks account and then navigate to Google Scholar.
Google Scholar can be found here.
If you have a Google account, sign into it now.
***If you do not have a Google account, please refer to the How to Sign Up for a Google Account Guide located here. After you have signed up for an account and logged in, return to Google Scholar’s main page.***
In your new RefWorks tab, you can view your import log, check to see if you have any duplicate entries, or view your last imported folder with the options that appear. If you would like to see your complete list of citations, click on the All Documents button located in the upper left part of the page.
At the left of the screen, you should see this set of options and menus:
To organize your citations, you can use the Folder button located in the upper left of the screen, framed in green, to create folders for your different projects. To add citations to a folder, click on the box on the left side of them and then click on the Assign to Folder button, which appears in the orange diamond above.
Google Scholar and Refworks can be used in conjunction with one another to make keeping track of your legal research and citations much easier by creating your Bluebook citations for you.
As an example of what you can do with the combination of Google Scholar and RefWorks, this guide will walk through a search for articles concerning self incrimination and the unlocking of encrypted files, saving the articles for later viewing, and importing the articles’ citation information into RefWorks. Going through this example will show you the needed steps when importing citation information into Refworks from Google Scholar and then creating a customized bibliography.
Finding Articles and Citations with Google Scholar
Type the following terms into the search box located in the center of the screen: self, incrimination, encryption. This will bring up scholarly articles dealing with the topic of self-incrimination and encrypted files. Beneath the articles returned, you will see this list of options:
If you click on the Save option, framed by a green square in the picture above, the article that you chose will be saved in your Google Scholar’s library so you can view it later.
If you click on the Cite option, circled in red in the image above, a list of sample citations and an option menu will pop up. The list of options should look similar to this:
Be sure to check the box in the bottom left of the menu; it has been framed in green in the picture above. It will allow you to add future citations to your RefWorks account without having to go through the citation options menu. Now, click on the Import into RefWorks option, circled in red above, and the citation will sent to your RefWorks account.
Your RefWorks account page will be opened in a new tab showing that you have imported a citation. You can close the new tab and continue to look for articles, if you would like. Note that the Cite option below the articles has now been replaced by the Import into RefWorks option, which allows you to directly import an article’s citation information into RefWorks.
Organizing saved articles in a Google Scholar saved library is not a difficult task, but it is not an intuitive process. This section of the guide will show you how to add user defined labels to saved articles so that they can be organized in a way that you would like.
Log into your Google account and then navigate to Google Scholar. You can use the link here to access Google Scholar. At the top of the screen you will see this set of options:
Click on the My library link, circled in red in the picture above, and you will be taken to your article library.
Once you are in your library, click on the title of an article that you would like to organize. You will be sent to page displaying bibliographic information about the article. At the top of the screen, you will see this menu:
To add a label, click on the Labels button, circled in red in the picture above. A drop down menu will appear that will allow you create a new label. Once you have created a label, it will assign that label to the article. You can add multiple labels to an article to help organize them.
In the Labels dropdown menu, you can also choose to manage your labels, which allows you to edit or delete them. From now on, if you click on the labels that you have added to an article any article that is in your library with the same label will be displayed in a list for you.
If you would to delete an article from your library, click on its title and then click on the Delete button, framed in green in the picture above.
To create a bibliography, chose the citations that you would like to be formatted and then click on the Create Bibliography button, which is located at the top of the page. The following menu should appear:
For the Bluebook citation format to be available in the menu, you will first have to use the Search Output Styles button, framed in green above. It will cause the following menu to appear:
If you input ‘Bluebook’ into the search field, framed in green above, and run a search, the results will show you the two Bluebook citation styles available in Refworks. Select a style, and Refworks will format your citations into the Bluebook style that you chose. You can then copy the bibliography to your clipboard using the copy option that becomes available.
*****A Word of Caution!****
While Refworks can be a time saving tool, it is far from perfect. Be sure to check the citations that are returned in your bibliographies. Refworks does make mistakes with citations, particularly with journals that have complex volume number schemes.