There’s a cool online bibliographic utility that I stumbled upon recently. It’s called BibMe and they say it’s “The fully automatic bibliography maker that auto-fills.” You can enter items manually or search their database for an item (items include books, articles, websites, and films.) using title, author, or ISBN.

If you’re not logged in and you do a search, you’ll get the results and all, but if you click the ’select’ button next to an item, it gives you a blank pane and doesn’t tell you anything. I took a guess and created an account and logged in and tried again. THIS time I got a screen that had all the info about the book in boxes, allowing me to change any of the info before adding it to my bibliography.

Once you’ve created the bibliography, you can download the results (in .rtf format) or save them to your account, and they give you the options of MLA, APA, or Chicago formats. If you change formats, make sure you click the Change button before downloading. Otherwise, you’ll THINK you’ve downloaded the new set of records when you really didn’t. The formats look pretty good overall. APA shows the titles in italics (which is allowed now) while MLA keeps them underlined.

If you’re like me, you’re curious about where they got their information. Well, if you dig into the “Help” info, you find:

We leverage the following services for our Auto-fill citation sources:
Book: Amazon Books
Magazine: LookSmart FindArticles
Newspaper: Yahoo! News
Website: Proprietary Web page parser
Journal: CiteULike Academic Papers
Film: Amazon DVD & VHS

Probably the most USEFUL part of this website, though, is the Citation Guide link on their toolbar. It takes you to a page with examples for different kinds of materials (e.g., books with 1, 2, 3, or more authors, websites, etc.) and three tabs at the top–one for each formatting style. So if you don’t find your item in their database or if you just enjoy doing it manually, this will be very helpful. Granted, it’s still only for general works, so if you’ve got quirky things like corporate authors or musical scores, you’ll still need the regular citation manuals. But this is great for basic materials.