Reference Creator

In my first post I will talk about the project that led me think about opening a blog. This hasn’t been the most difficult thing I have worked on, but the one I put more effort to make it accessible to everyone.  I am talking about my Reference Creator, which can be downloaded here.

This software is design to be helpful for people writing articles. In my experience, people tend to write scientific article putting the in-text citation, without worrying for long time about the extremely boring task of organizing the reference. If you are not using Latex or some particular text editor, creating the reference can be an incredibly tedious task. And that’s when my software comes in handy! It will just take your in-text citations and create a reference list for you!

Let’s say that you paste this text: “[...] emphasis within a dualroute framework (e.g., Ratcliff, 1978; 2013). The idea that readers have the [...]“. The software will recognize 2 citations: Ratcliff, 1978, and Ratcliff, 2013. It will then look on the Mendeley database for the most likely papers, make some check on year, numbers/name of authors (taking into account “et al.” if present) and give back the reference list:

Ratcliff, R. (1978). A theory of memory retrieval. Psychological Review, 85(2) 59-108. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.85.2.59

Ratcliff, R. (2013). Parameter variability and distributional assumptions in the diffusion model. Psychological review, 120(1). doi:10.1037/a0030775

Warning and suggestions are given in case of double matching (two or more papers with same author list and year).

More information can be found in the website.

The file is completely free (even if you don’t have a MATLAB license) and everyone can change the source code (only if you have a MATLAB license, unfortunately).