EASY Essay Referencing with RefMe

Fortunately, I am no longer a student but I know many people still are or about to adventure into their last chapter of education. College and university usually involves writing a LOT of (usually boring) essays but there are a lot of do's and don'ts when it comes to writing them. The dreaded referencing being the biggest cause for concern.

When writing an essay, you may need to quote some information from somewhere to back up a point that you are trying to make or to credit a source. This could be from an online article, a book or even a YouTube video. Whatever information you decide to use as your source needs to be correctly referenced so it doesn't flag up as plagiarism.  

When I was a student, my university used the Havard Referencing system which is just one of many that different education systems use. I'll be honest here. I bought a book on how to correctly Havard Reference in my essays but I didn't once bother to open it. I just completely winged my essays and again in all honesty; if I had learnt how to reference properly, I would have got higher marks on my written work. Boo!

If only I had known about RefME back then! An online web and mobile tool that helps you to generate citations, reference lists and bibliographies whilst writing essays. I always found it extremely difficult remembering to keep a bibliography updated every time I worked on an essay purely because I also found it difficult remembering HOW write out the layout for a reference.

Let's take a look at how easy it is!

Firstly, head on over to www.refme.com and sign up! It takes no longer than thirty seconds. Perfect.

Add your essay title. For example purposes, I've made up an essay titled 'How has fashion changed?'.
You can add loads of separate essays too if you have more than one on the go!

To add a reference, you select what type of publication you are referencing from. I selected web page and then pasted in the URL. RefMe then cleverly does everything for you and creates the reference. Once you hit save, it's added and you have a bibliography building up which hasn't taken up any time than what it would have if you created it yourself!

As you can see, you can add a crazy amount of different references! Makes it super easy!

So, there is also a mobile app which comes in very handy if you're a student on the go. More often than enough, I used to be in the library or in a book shop and I would find a really cool source that I wanted to use in an essay. The mobile app makes it super easy to track sources you find on the go.  You log in with your web page login details and you can either scan the barcode of the book in question or type in the barcode number. Oh, and it automatically transfers over this information to the web page! So handy!

I really wish I had known about RefME when I was a student. It would have made my life 10 times easier! I hope this has helped anyone who is a student. Essays can now be stress free! :)

Disclaimer: This post is in collaboration to review RefME but all words are my own.