this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024

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Use Zotero (mander.xyz)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[+] sturlabragason -18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

This is what LLMs are for. Just double check their work.

Edit: It seems based on the many downotes that I don’t know shit about citations 😅

Guys, I have no idea, never had to write one of these. 😅 It was just a suggestion.

I use GPT4o daily for work stuff. It often does the job pretty reliably. However all the inserting citation into the text would of course not work, seems that zotero that others are mentioning is made for the job and would therefore do it much better.

It seems people let their prejudices get in the way of using LLMs like the limited tools they are. They are not AI, just a pretty decent guessing machine with multiple limitations.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How exactly would you use an LLM for something like this?

[–] sturlabragason -2 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Here’s an example prompt;

Prompt for LLM on Generating APA Citations (7th Edition)

Instructions: I need to create APA format citations for my research paper based on the 7th edition of the APA guidelines. Below are examples of correct APA citations for different types of sources, followed by a list of sources that need to be cited. Please generate the citations accurately, paying special attention to formatting rules such as capitalization, italicization, and punctuation.

Important Formatting Rules:

Titles: For journal articles and web pages, use sentence case (capitalize only the first word of the title and subtitle, if any, and any proper nouns). For books and journals, use title case (capitalize all major words) and italicize the title.
Authors: List up to 20 authors in the citation. For more than 21 authors, list the first 19 followed by an ellipsis and the final author's name.
DOIs and URLs: Always include the full DOI or URL as clickable links without a period at the end.

Citation Examples:

Journal article: Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of the article. Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages. https://doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyy
Book: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the book. Publisher.
Website: Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the webpage. Website Name. URL

Sources List:

Smith, J. (2022). Understanding LLMs. Journal of AI Research, 15(2), 123-145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jair.2022.05.001
Brown, L., & Green, T. (2019). AI in modern education. Cambridge University Press.
Miller, S. (2021, June 5). The evolution of language models. Tech Times. https://www.techtimes.com/evolution-language-models
Johnson, P., Lee, M., & Black, R. (2020). The future of AI in society. AI and Ethics Review, 22(4), 215-230.

Additional Instructions:

Ensure that article titles are in sentence case, while journal names and book titles are in title case and italicized.
For multiple authors, follow APA guidelines and use "&" between authors, with commas separating names.
Make sure DOIs and URLs are accurate and correctly formatted as clickable links.

Once you have generated the citations, please double-check for consistency in formatting (capitalization, italics, and punctuation) and ensure that all sources follow the APA 7th edition rules.

Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Good joke, you'd have to double and triple check every single citation as LLMs love to hallucinate.

I wouldn't risk my title or expulsion because an LLM fucked up my work. Even one missed reference or a false citation could cost you plenty.

[–] sturlabragason 1 points 4 months ago

Yeah newer models are less prone to that problem but definetely agree 🙂

[–] sturlabragason 1 points 4 months ago

The intentiom was for the author to supply the data and the LLM to provide the formatting only.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

But why do it like that, if zotero is easier to use, less prone to errors and uses much fewer resources?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This only builds a formated bibliography where your input is an unformated bibliography... It also can't accurately do the more tedious (and important)part of actually putting the in text citations. In short you have to do the same amount of upfront work of getting all the relevant citations in a list then additional work on checking that the llm formatted properly and didn't hallucinate then still have to go put in the in text citations.

Wheres with endnote or zotero you choose from your list add the intext, autoformat from your choice and it's automatically put in a formatted bibliography.

[–] sturlabragason 1 points 4 months ago

Yeah from my perspective I somehow assumed that was the hard part 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

This will not get you far lol.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

That's a lot of trouble, you can just ask it if it's telling the truth.

[–] Atrichum 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It straight up makes up sources and citations.

[–] sturlabragason 1 points 4 months ago

I was intending for the author to chomp in the data and the LLM to spit it out properly formatted.