Preview of upcoming release – MLA 7th edition updates and revamped Citation Guide

We’ve had a lot of people clamoring for the updated MLA 7th edition guidelines – and we’re glad to report we’re about 1 week away from completing our work on the updates. Along with updating the MLA guidelines for each of the source types we support, we’re adding additional form fields to allow for more citing possibilities (like chapters for books, and cities within newspaper names).

Perhaps one of the biggest changes that is coming up in our next release is our revamped Citation Guide page. It will give in-depth explanations of lots of citation possibilities, along with plenty of example citations to show you how it’s done. Take a look at what to expect:

MLA 7 updates coming soon

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer! It may be slow in the bibliography world right now, but we’re still working. The MLA guidelines were recently updated in the MLA Handbook, 7th edition and we’ve been hard at work to update BibMe to comply with these guidelines. Additionally, we’ve spent a lot of time on revising our Citation Guide to do a better job at explaining the guidelines for each source type and for each formatting style. We’re expecting to have these updates completed by the end of the summer. Stay tuned for some previews.

Our newest release – 13 months in the making!

It’s been almost 13 months since our last updated, but we’ve been working hard over that time period to make BibMe a better web application. And we still have a lot to do. Thanks so much for your patience. Take a look around and get yourself acquainted with the changes that have been made. Read all about it below:

• Tooltip help – we’ve introduced “tooltip help” to BibMe. When entering information about your source into the form fields, hold your cursor over the field label (indicated by blue text and a dotted underline) and you will see a tooltip pop up. This will provide details of the formatting rules and guidelines that are relevant to the source you are citing.
• Citation tagging – you can now tag individual citations, in order to categorize them by subject, author, or any other area of interest. This feature is available on the “My Saved Bibliographies” page. Once you tag citations, you can filter by them and see a list of citations with a specific tag. You can then download this filtered list or save it as a new bibliography!
• Improved “My Bibliography” interface – we’ve made many changes to the way your in-progress bibliography displays. First, your bibliography is now confined to a specifically-sized section so that large bibliographies don’t make the page scroll down infinitely. Second, you can now name and rename your bibliography simply by clicking the pencil icon next to the bibliography title, which we’ve also added to the interface.
• Photograph support – BibMe now supports citing photographs, pictures, or images found online. Check the dropdown list from the “Other” tab to cite a photograph.
• Annotations – you can now append notes or general information to your citations. These annotations will appear at the bottom of your exported bibliography.
• Calendar interface for entering dates – thanks to a Rails plugin called CalendarDateSelect, you can now use a popup calendar to select and enter date information, instead of filling it in. Click the calendar icon next to any month/day/year fields to use it.
• Expanded Help and FAQ page – in response to common questions and emails we receive, we’ve added new questions and areas of concern to our Help and FAQ page.
• Design improvements – all across the website, you should notice some visual tweaks and changes. We’ve standardized the web site design and thrown some polish over everything.
• Magazine search patched – the AutoFill functionality for Magazine is restored, after having to change the way BibMe interfaced with FindArticles.
• Improved Blog page – we finally matched our blog’s color scheme to the rest of the website. But we also have provided an RSS feed link so you can subscribe to our blog and be automatically updated about any updates, changes, or new features that we add to BibMe.
• Formatting style updates – we want to thank all of our users who reported any inaccuracies in the style guide’s formatting rules. BibMe has since fixed any issues.
• Various bug fixes – many of the visual bugs that persisted have been fixed.

Issues with magazine search

If you’ve tried to do a search for a magazine article using our AutoFill functionality in the last few days, you may have noticed that an error message is popping up, instead of your search results. We are aware of this issue and are working to resolve it quickly. We’ll give you more details as they become available. Thanks for your patience.

Happy Holidays!

The entire BibMe team would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a safe, healthy, and enjoyable holiday season! Have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, a great Kwanza, and a Happy New Year.

I know we’ve been promising everyone an update – believe us, it’s almost done! It will absolutely be available in time for spring semester starting after the holidays. But for now, enjoy your winter break!

Post-Election update

I hope everyone got a chance to vote last night. Even if the candidate you voted for did not turn out to be the President-elect, please be aware that you took part in a democratic process that makes the United States as special as it is, and that you were a part of something important.

If you’re wondering where our next release is – you should be happy to know we are putting the finishing touches on it. Only a few bugs need to get sorted out and then we will be ready to update the site. We’re looking at about a week before we can resolve everything, but barring any catastrophes, you guys should be happier bibliographers very soon.

Here’s a taste of things you will see with our next release:

• Tooltip help
• An additional source type
• Citation tagging
• Annotations
• Formatting style updates

Don’t worry, we haven’t forsaken you!

Hey, beloved bibliographers!

We just wanted to let you know we’re still alive and hard at work. Hopefully, you didn’t think we had disappeared or closed up shop. It’s been difficult for the team to develop at the same pace that we were, considering most of us have graduated and are now working full-time. But we have some features in the pipeline coming up that we think you will enjoy. Some of these things have been works-in-progress for a while and are contingent on some other items being completed. But keep a look out for a release in the coming weeks.

Stay tuned!

Cheers,
Kevin

About the Advertising

As you may have noticed, we recently added a little advertising to BibMe. We did this not because we’re trying to be greedy or annoy anyone, but because, unfortunately, there are some real costs involved in hosting and maintaining BibMe. We sincerely hope the advertising doesn’t offend anyone, if it does please let us know. We’re going to be experimenting a bit over the course of the next few weeks to try to determine the best approach. We may end of scrapping it entirely.

Happy Citing!

Ben Tucker

BibMe “Box of Cannolis” release

New Features that were just released:

• New “My Saved Bibliographies” interface – it’s easier to view and edit saved bibliographies now than it has ever been.
• Share your bibliographies – share any of your saved bibliographies with your friends for collaboration.
• Edit bibliography function – many users requested this functionality, and now you can correct any problems with your entries!
• Support for journals found in a database – you spoke, we responded.
• Better browser compatibility – our focus has been supporting users with older versions of Internet Explorer.

Let us know if you run into any issues with this new version of BibMe.

BibMe “Large Pie of Pepperoni” release

New Features that were just released:

• Updated formatting rules – this accounts for new editions of the formatting guide books. See help section for more information.
• Expanded Interview options – additional Interview citations for third party types
• Refreshed “errors alert” interface – you will now be informed of your entry field errors in a more intuitive manner
• Redesigned Citation Guide page

In addition to this, BibMe is now running on an entirely reengineered core. Let us know if you run into any issues with this new version of BibMe.