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Comment by bdg | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely detest MLA style citation. It's overly complex and needlessly adds information where it is not readily useful in context.

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It's a big money-making scheme. They change it all the time to sell more style guides. Complete bullshit. I hate MLA.

Judging from the linked excerpt, they don't seem particularly clued in, either.

It's terribly inconsistent. I'm in the middle of developing a library to generate citations, and I've had to write out the formatting for each separate type of citation manually (for example, a whole book's title is italicized: in a series, it is underlined).

I hope you will be making it publicly available! Citation tools are sadly still lacking.

I'm building a product around it, actually. http://getnotedapp.com

It's intended for schools and will be a pay-for service, but the core citation-creating tool is going to be available as a RubyGem. http://github.com/noted/scholar

It's nice that people are interested!

Can you elaborate?

As a student, I shouldn't have to know about complex citations rules while writing a paper. There are a few tools that take care of this, but they are either non-free (EasyBib), non-comprehensive (other online generators) or require that you use certain software (EndNote). To my knowledge there is no free, universal citation generator.

Great, thanks for the reply. I'm also working on something to compete with Easybib. But at the moment it definitely falls into the 'non-comprehensive' category that you mention.

I've used KnightCite [1] and it has worked out quite well.

[1] http://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/

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