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Citation Wizard Assessment Guide

The IMSA Citation Wizard is a tool with several purposes.

First, students may use it to create properly formatted citations without having to look up formatting guidelines. Making it easy to create good citations is important if we want to encourage students always to cite the sources they use. The 21CIF Citation Wizard provides options for five citation styles: Modern Language Association (MLA), American Psychological Association (APA), Chicago Style, Council of Biology Editors (CBE) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Other free Citation tools are available on the Internet and serve a similar purpose.

A second purpose is to help students build complete citations. By clicking View Citation, the formatted citation is compiled, which may include a placeholder for information that is missing. For example, in the case of the 21CIF Citation Wizard, if information about the publisher has not been entered, the following reference is included in the citation: ** publisher **. This prompts students to track down that information--if available--before they copy and paste the reference into their paper. Minor editing may be required--for example, if a document title ends with a question mark, the default punctuation that the Wizard uses (.) should be removed.

A third purpose is to help educators assess whether students are able to find a) required information AND b) cite it correctly. Included in this Kit is an online Citation Assessment which is based on the Citation Wizard and offers a means to assess students' ability to locate information necessary for a citation. The assessment consists of a pair of search challenges at four difficulty levels: beginner, beginner to intermediate, intermediate and intermediate to advanced. The solutions for finding the required information are printed below, as well as the properly formatted citations in MLA, Chicago and APA styles. In all but the beginner level, finding the author, publisher, document title, web page title, and publication date takes some digging. Where this is the case, we have noted how the information may be found. The intermediate to advanced problems are quite difficult and require longer explanations.

Using either the online Citation Assessment or the Citation Wizard, refer to the tables below to assess students' skills in citing sources. Assign them a challenge level (or have them pick their own).

In the examples below, note that date accessed always reads March 8, 2007, the day these examples were created. Students should use whatever today's date is instead.

Be aware that there may be more than one right answer when it comes to naming the publisher and titles of documents and webpages. Online is murkier than print in this regard. We have taken the following positions about citing the publisher and titles:

Publisher: In the case of personal web pages, it can be hard to decide who is the publisher. While the owner of the host site and the person who posted the page may both be responsible for the information that appears, we consider the person who posts unendorsed information to be the publisher. This applies to cases where a hosting service takes no responsibility for the information its clients post. Examples include universities that make space available for faculty and students (indicated by ~ in the url) and sites such as angelfire, geocities, bravehost and myspace that make no claims about the credibility of the information found on their sites. NOTE that of the choices below, only MLA style makes this an issue; Chicago and APA styles do not require naming the publisher of online information.

Titles: To be consistent, we prefer to use the words at the top of the page that look like a title. If that is unavailable, then we use the page <title> information found in the Source Code.

Students may print out their citations from the Wizard or the results page from the online Assessment and hand it in so you can see how they did. The score given in the online version of the assessment merely reflects the number of items successfully found for the two challenges--the percentage score should not be used as the basis for a grade. If partial information was entered, or formatted incorrectly (e.g., a document title using ALL CAPS), it is noted on the report page.

Note: web page information and content is subject to change beyond our control. If you discover any information has changed, please let us know and we will amend the assessment.

IMSA Citation Wizard

Online Citation Assessment