Google Docs: Insert Footnotes Easily With New "Research" Feature
Submitted by jajacobs on Tue, 2012-05-22 06:33.
Google introduced a new features to Google Docs, its cloud-based word processor, recently. It allows you to quickly do a google search on a word or phrase that you highlight in a document you are editing and then insert a footnote to a web page you find. Here is what a footnote to an item in FDSys looks like:
1. "Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster And The Future Of Offshore ..." 2011. 22 May. 2012 <http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-OILCOMMISSION/content-detail.html>
And here is a cite to the same item in WorldCat:
2. "Deep water : the Gulf oil disaster and the future of offshore drilling ..." 2011. 22 May. 2012 <http://www.worldcat.org/title/deep-water-the-gulf-oil-disaster-and-the-future-of-offshore-drilling-report-to-the-president/oclc/696156233>
The Chronicle has an article about the new google feature here:
- Google Docs Research Tool: A Review, By Prof. Hacker, The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 21, 2012).
Incidentally, I chose the Deep Water example because it is highlighted in a GPO press release about GPO teaming with Barnes & Noble to sell federal eBooks.
GPO makes eBooks available in partnership with Google’s eBookstore, OverDrive, Ingram, Zinio, and other online vendors.
That's right: you can buy an ebook or download a PDF from FDsys for free. I'm not sure who is getting the worse deal: the vendors or the public...
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If you check out the dates
If you check out the dates for a few sites, you'll find they are wildly off. There isn't any curated metadata behind the citations, which kind of limits their utility. We'll see what they come up with in the next iteration.
many problems
yes indeed. the review by "prof hacker" says the dates seem to be the date google discovered the page and points out other problems too.
i'd like to think this is a first iteration and it will get better, but i'm skeptical. as prof hacker points out, it is nice to see some kind of citation. but this iteration this seems likely to give the appearance academic substance rather than actual "research" or decent academic citations.
the quality of the citation will probably vary a lot, of course.
nevertheless, we can be sure we'll see this tool used and should be aware of it so that we can address its strengths and weaknesses in our teaching.
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