For quick reference: use my automatic citation generator at https://justciteit.com I hope you find that it improves the quality of your research and writing.
Hey Steemains,
I'm sure most of you would unequivocally agree that this list represents some of the most troubling issues prevalent within the information era:
- a toxic obsession with artificial "value";
- the similarly insatiable hunger to spread excessive hype and speculation;
- a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between an opinion piece and evidence-based research;
- propagating information that ranges from poorly researched at best, to criminally negligent at worst.
It may seem obvious that I'm largely alluding to the prolonged market crash that crypto is experiencing, which I strongly believe can be attributed to the aforementioned factors. However, these points are relevant to virtually every area of our online lives; whether it may be the publication of fake news on Facebook in a covert attempt to sway readers' political beliefs, or the intentional spread of false rhetoric in order to manipulate financial markets. No matter the specific details, it is obvious that poor quality information is detrimental to everyone in society (except for the few individuals who may get away with their lies).
Thus, the question is not so much whether online content should abide by certain quality standards -- clearly, it needs to -- but on how exactly to assuage this problematic spread of low quality information. It's an issue that has really captivated me in recent months. So much so that I collaborated on an artificial intelligence-based tool which I believe can play a role in combating misinformation.
What exactly does this tool do? It automatically generates a properly formatted citation and bibliography reference for any URL on the web. In other words, the URL can point to a standard website, a blog post, or even an academic journal article. The tool will automatically crawl the link and generate a Harvard-style reference within 5 seconds. (This citation style is the one most commonly used within universities and academia but I am working on creating different citation formats, such as APA 6 and MLA).
There are other citation tools out there (e.g. CiteThisForMe, EndNote) but they are both very clunky, slow and not user-friendly in comparison. Furthermore, Just Cite It's engine is capable of batch processing 10 unique citations at once, so you could technically generate an entire formatted bibliography in under 10 seconds. Please note that this tool is currently in alpha mode, so I'd love to hear the community's suggestions and feedback. Myself and a couple of others have put in a lot of effort over the past few months to get this "intelligent citation" tool together. If even a handful of people benefit from its use, it'd give me much more motivation to iterate over the current model and make it even better (or add more features).
I believe it greatly simplifies the ease with which writers, content producers, researchers and students are able to attribute an authoritative source to their work. This ends up being a win-win-win; your writing is considered more credible, you properly credit the source of your research, and the reader can be somewhat confident that what they're reading isn't completely full of hot air.
Thanks for reading,
Jordan