RefWorks Overview
Welcome to RefWorks
RefWorks is a reference management service that supports the needs of students, faculty and librarians. With a streamlined user experience, full-text management and collaboration features, RefWorks gives students and faculty a tool that enables a more efficient and reliable process for producing research papers.
Features
- A modern interface that makes it easy to store and manage all of your references, together with your uploaded citations.
- References can include uploaded files, physical or electronic books or chapters cataloged in your institution, and citations on, or reference by, external web sites.
- View and annotate uploaded citations directly in RefWorks.
- Multiple options for filtering, organizing, tagging, searching, and sorting references. Includes tools to help edit references in bulk and to find and eliminate duplicate references.
- Multiple options for viewing lists of references, including features to help identify missing fields required for your bibliographic formats.
- Multiple citation styles for output, including CSL styles and a comprehensive citation style editor to enable you to create new styles.
- Add references to RefWorks directly from websites using direct export (when supported) or using the Save to RefWorks bookmarklet.
- When enabled by your institution (see Configuring Site Settings), you can synchronize RefWorks with Dropbox, in which case RefWorks automatically makes copies of your uploaded citations in your Dropbox account.
- Ability to configure single sign-on with your local institution.
Terminology
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Bibliography | List of references used in your document or research, whether or not they are cited in the document. |
| Bibliography Format | One of the formats defined by a citation style. Defines how the reference appears in a bibliography. |
| Citation | References cited in the body and/or end of your document or research. |
| Citation Format | One of the formats defined by a citation style. Defines how the reference appears when appearing inline in the document text. |
| Citation Style | Formats for how references appear in a document. Each style can define the following formats: bibliography format, citation (inline) format, footnote format. |
| Footnote Format | One of the formats defined by a citation style. Defines how the reference appears when appearing as a footnote or end note. |
| Ref ID | A unique reference ID for each reference in RefWorks. |
| Reference | An entry in RefWorks that can be used to generate a citation. For uploaded files, the reference includes the uploaded file. For electronic texts, videos, and other digital sources, the reference can include links to the source. |
| Reference Type | The three major types of references are book, journal article, and generic. For the complete list, see Reference Types. |
Getting Help / Submitting Ideas
Select the Help icon at the top right for the following options:
- Knowledge Center – Open RefWorks documentation on the Knowledge Center
- Contact Support – Open a support submission form to submit a support case
- To access the RefWorks video tutorial page, select the video icon in the utility toolbar.