And now Easybib

And so I go back to The Onion and it's wonderful coverage of the declaration of war in 1914 to look at the accuracy of EasyBib's references for this source.

The link to this source is: https://www.theonion.com/august-5-1914-181958824 and the citation from EasyBib is:

The Onion. “August 5, 1914.” The Onion, The Onion, 11 Sept. 2018, www.theonion.com/august-5-1914-1819588242.

I was concerned about three aspects of this reference:

• Firstly, the Onion is given as a corporate author, despite the MLA 8th edition advice which is as follows: if a corporate author is also the publisher, give it as the publisher and not as the author.

• Secondly, there is no date of access given.  The MLA 8th edition handbook says: "Since online works typically can be changed or removed at anytime, the date on which you accessed online material is often an important indicator of the version you consulted."  If you are working at an IBO school, you know that students must include the access date.
• Finally, The Onion is repeated 3 times: once as the corporate author, once as the website and once as the publisher.  Again, the advice is to leave the publisher field blank if the publisher's name is the same as the site (container) name

Below is the Noodletools version following MLA 8th.
"August 5, 1914." The Onion, 3 Aug. 2006, www.theonion.com/august-5-1914-1819588242. Accessed 18 Sept. 2019.

To Apogee or Not to Apogee!

[Apogee (aka Apogee 2|Citation Creator) is an extension for Chrome which can be used to reference sources and check on their credibility.]

To Apogee or Not to Apogee?  

Well, after investigating this extension to Chrome, I would give a resounding "No!".

I was asked the other day by a student if he could use Apogee 2, a Chrome extention to create his works cited list.  I said no, that he was required to use Noodletools.  However, I did promise to investigate it.

Just in case your students ask you about using it for citing, here is what I discovered. I added the app and then went into the settings.  The first thing to note is that Apogee tells the user that MLA 8 is not as popular as MLA 7.  In fact, not many people are using it.  I don't know about you but my school has been using it since it was first introduced.  

Next, I chose a web page that a student had recently used in his research.

Apogee gives its version of the MLA 8 reference but unfortunately it isn't correct.  Note the following mistakes:

1. The author's name is not inverted.  In a Works Cited List the author's last name comes first.
2. BBC News is included in the author's name.
3. The title of the article is completely wrong.
4. No date is given, despite the fact that there is one in the article:  20 May 2018.
5. The access date is given but is wrongly located.

Below is the MLA reference done in Noodletools MLA 8:

Next I looked at the credibility rating for an article which a student mistook for an authentic one from World War One, but which was actually from the Onion, an American satirical website:

This web page received a 100% credibility rating, whereas the BBC article was only given 80%.

I think I will rest my case there for the time being and check in with Apogee in 6 months to see if it has improved.