Skip to Main Content

RefWorks

Organizing and sharing references

When you first create your RefWorks account, you will have one workspace to save your references, called Untitled project. To rename it, open the Projects menu. You can rename projects, as well as creating and managing multiple projects (for different assignments, for the thesis, etc.) separately using the same RefWorks account:

You can create folders and subfolders to store and organize your sources. Go to My Folders area, click Add Folder and give it a name:

To move references to a newly created new folder and/or to a different existing folder, select the references and click Assign to folder; select the new folder, then confirm by clicking Apply:

You can quickly retrieve a reference saved into your RefWorks library using the Search tool. You can enter an author’s name, or a word that appears in a title, or anywhere in all bibliographic records that you have added to your RefWorks account. If you want to search only in a specific folder and/or in a specific field of the bibliographic record, use the Advanced search:

 

You can edit references and modify them manually, for example to make corrections or to add further details:

To make sure that there are no duplicates in your reference list, select the folder you wish to check in My Folders area on the left-hand side navigation bar. You can also check for duplicates in all the references saved into your RefWorks library, by clicking first All References.

Click Tools on the top menu, and select Find duplicates (or click Duplicates in the left-hand side bar and choose Find duplicates).

You can choose to find only references that match exactly, and/or references that are very similar bibliographic information. You can also choose to compare information in specific fields of the records other than the default “title”, “author” and “year”.

Results will be displayed in the Duplicates section on the left-hand side menu; click on Process completed, see results:

If duplicates are found, RefWorks will display the list of possible identical references and automatically marks suggested duplicate to eliminate (you can modify the selection If you wish, by unchecking the box and by clicking the box next to the reference you want to eliminate):

 

 

 

You can share your Folders or an entire project with other RefWorks users. In the My Folders area, open the options menu of the folder you wish to share and select Share folder; in the Share settings dialogue box, enter the email addresses of the RefWorks users you wish to invite (Invite more people to share) and select whether the recipients can only read the references (Can read) or also add comments (Can annotate) or add and remove the references in the shared folder (Can modify):

If you want to share the references saved in a specific folder with someone who is not registered on RefWorks, click Create public URL and then Copy URL to save the URL of the list to the clipboard; you can then paste it where you wish (in an email, in a social media message, etc.) and recipients will be able to view the list of references as an html page: