Use Citefast.com to Speed Up Citations for APA, MLA, or Chicago Style

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my secret for quickly formatting APA, MLA, or Chicago style references -- Citefast.com.

I'm back in graduate school after a gap of almost 20 years.  I'm getting a masters in social work and all of my writing assignments are required to be in APA style.  The first semester almost did me in trying to remember all of the arcane and totally arbitrary style rules -- you know, do you spell out first names or use initials?  what part gets italicized?  when do I use an ampersand and when do I spell out the word "and"?  To be frank, I'm almost 50, I have a limited amount of space in my brain -- I sincerely do not need to clutter it up with this kind of pointless information.  But unless I wanted to continue to refer back to the handbook EVERY time I did a citation, I WAS forced to remember some of this nonsense.  

Okay -- just a quick disclaimer.  I totally get why there are standards in writing and for research -- I'm not disputing that.  And if I were going to make a profession out of researching and publishing studies, I would be WAY more interested in committing this information to memory, but as it is -- I want to be a licensed psychotherapist.  APA style is just going to get me through school, but will have limited utility in my professional life.  

There is one aspect of APA formating that is almost always the most time consuming for me -- creating citations.  As everyone knows, every time you reference another study or someone else's work, you need to give them credit.  I've had reference sections that contained over 30 citations.  Done manually, this would take me easily over an hour and would probably have a decent number of errors in it.   So, I went looking for a tool to help.  I found a couple and tried them all out.  My biggest complaint was the number of advertisements and how intrusive the ads were in the process, but I found that Citefast.com was hands down the best and most user-friendly tool of all of the options.  

Citefast.com is a webpage, that you don't even need to create an account for.  Although if you do create an account, you can save your citations for later.  You can see that advertisements are kept to a minimum -- it has a pretty clean interface.  Up here you can choose the formatting style: APA, MLA 8, or Chicago, I'm going to focus on APA.  Now, you select a source -- I'm generally citing journal articles which is the default, but you can choose any of these other options.  Now here's my favorite part -- you can search by title or author for the study that you are going to cite.  So, I'll do a quick example here -- I enter the title of the article, hit the search button and there is the article I'm looking for as the first hit.  I click on it and Citefast grabs all of the information that it already knows about that article, populates all of the fields, and presents it to you for review.  Things look pretty good here -- but Citefast warns us that the title needs to have the capitalization of the title changed manually in order to conform to APA rules.  That is what it's saying here in red, so I go in and change to initial caps for the only the first word and first word after a colon.  After I make those change, everything else looks good, so I hit Save Citation.  Okay now I can see it all formatted properly under View Citations.  Just clicking on it brings it up perfectly formatted to paste directly into an APA styled document.  In addition, if I hit this little "in-text" link, Citefast shows me how I should reference this work within the document.  Brilliant.  

There are times, of course, when Citefast doesn't recognize the article.  Like this one.  I search for it, but don't see the article I'm looking for anywhere in the results.  In this case, I just choose manual entry and use the fields to enter all of the relevant information for this source.  It is not quite as fast, but it is still extremely helpful since it prompts for all of the information and then creates the citation with perfect formatting.  

Citefast gives you some other options, like the ability to export all or save to an account, but since I'm generally working from a citations spreadsheet -- I usually just copy and paste as I go.  I have a video on that process as well, if you are interested.  

And that is it!  This tool has literally saved me hours and hours of work.  It prevents me from having to keep all of this pointless information in my head AND my citations are cleaner and more correct than they would be if I did all of this manually.  

Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!