this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Formerly pretty good free resource for academic citations now turned into a giant pile of steamy hot garbage by the incredible asswipes at Chegg, a corporate name that mostly calls forth the image of a debilitating sexually transmitted infection.

Recommend using instead: https://www.scribbr.com/citation/generator. At least until they also start demanding your firstborn daughter for each citation.

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[–] gnomesaiyan 63 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] danque 4 points 1 year ago

Nah man more like: "let's find a way around it shall we"

[–] hedgehogging_the_bed 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

https://zbib.org/

Always free, not shitty. Been great for and simple for 5 years now.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't mind paying but their prices are always quite high. I'm not convinced these services are that expensive to run

[–] foggy 9 points 1 year ago

Does anyone subscribe to shit like this? Honestly..

[–] LazaroFilm 8 points 1 year ago

And for this reason, I’m out.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There's like 50 of these. If one enshittifies, jump to another.

Though if I was in academia, I wouldn't mind paying a couple bucks for a high quality one

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I'm in academia and I can report that still nobody uses those.

For your own archiving, just use Zotero.

For writing papers, use bibtex.

All those citing websites are just scams for high school/undergrad students trying to find their footing. There is no reason they should exist.

[–] turbowafflz 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I feel like if you were writing enough to be willing to pay that much it it would be more worth it to just learn to use LaTeX and have it all handled automatically

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

LaTeX doesn't do that automatically. One of the biggest service these sites provide is they scrape a website (or amazon or something for books) and get all the needed info to create a well rounded bib entry for you to copypaste into your ever growing bib file. It's a hassle to do it manualy in LaTeX, because even the author or date of a webpage can be hard to find sometimes.

[–] turbowafflz 1 points 1 year ago

True, fair. I guess I've just never encountered anything where getting that information was too hard

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

Latex doesn't auto generate citations though, wdym

[–] turbowafflz 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well it will automatically generate the citation, it just won't automatically get the information for it, which has never been an issue for me but thinking about it I can see how it would be sometimes

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I think Zotero can generate a file which you can then import into LaTeX with all of the citation details. That's worked very nicely for me in the past.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Sure but the overwhelming amount of people citing are students, a group not known to possess a huge amount of spending money

[–] prayer 6 points 1 year ago

Zotero time

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

"I never called her back because she gave me a raging case of the cheggs! I still can pee straight, and that it three months ago!"

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

Nobody seems to mind. I do. It drives me crazy. Apparently it's just me.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What the heck, people use apps for bibliographies now? FFS, just write it yourself.

I must be getting old. Back when I was in high school and college and needed to cite stuff, I did it all freehand. No such tools existed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You probably weren't graded for correct citation either. Nowadays you can get into real trouble for citing inconsistently or incorrectly. Especially with the automated plagiarism software that automatically runs over your texts once you turn them in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You probably weren't graded for correct citation either.

Oh yes I was. The college bookstore sold pocket style guides explicitly because of that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Correct citing can be learned, though.

And it's an important tool in your academia toolbox.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It’s not a necessary tool for all fields. I don’t know your area but mathematics journals have vastly different style guides and citation standards. The best way to handle this is to export a bibtex citation which is just a list of metadata tags, then plug in the journal’s style header before compiling your TeX.

[–] BreadOven 3 points 1 year ago

When you have 100s of citations in multiple chapters, it's nice to have. Especially if you can generate them from a PDF of the paper you're trying to cite.