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Quick Cite (for iPhone) For less than a buck, Quick Cite removes a lot of manual typing, and hence the possibility of introducing errors, in building bibliographies and works cited pages. View it not a catchall, but as one handy tool in your tool belt.

Quick Cite (for iPhone)

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MSRP
$0.99
  • Pros

    Automatically generates citations in APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE style.

  • Cons

    Citations delivered by e-mail one at a time. Doesn?t work with all books. Doesn't integrate with other bibliography software.

  • Bottom Line

    For less than a buck, Quick Cite removes a lot of manual typing, and hence the possibility of introducing errors, in building bibliographies and works cited pages. View it not a catchall, but as one handy tool in your tool belt.

For students, professors, researchers, and anyone who dreads piecing together works-cited pages, Quick Cite, developed in a single day by a group of students calling themselves 7Cubed, is a decent tool to strap onto your scholarly tool belt. The $0.99 Quick Cite app for iOS (4.0 or later) and Android uses the phone's camera and barcode scanning technology to generate bibliographic citations for most books printed after 1970 (when book barcodes were first implemented). The reference is then emailed to you in the style of your choice: APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE.

Citation Recitation
Quick Cite doesn't offer an infallible experience. Perhaps the biggest complaint among citations specialists is the app doesn't integrate with other bibliography software, like EndNote or RefWorks. And it doesn't work on all books. But for the times that you can use it, you'll be happy to have it.

Fire up the app, and it asks you for two pieces of information: your e-mail address and the citation style you need. You'll have to type your e-mail address, as the app can't pull it from your contacts list, but once it's in there, the app uses that address until you change it. Only four citation styles are supported, but they cover the three most widely used ones (APA, MLA, and Chicago Manual) and one that computer science and engineering students know and love, IEEE. Click "done" and the camera activates. Crop marks indicate where to line up the barcode. The app is pretty good at recognizing when the alignment is "close enough," so people like me who don't have a steady hand have a lot of wiggle room.

Once Quick Cite sees the barcode, it captures it automatically so the user doesn't have to press any buttons. The citation appears on screen with a confirmation that it has been e-mailed.

Reference Deference
Testing the app in the PCmag labs, I scrounged up a handful of books, some of which are a little out of the ordinary. Quick Cite summoned the references for all but one, an exam prep book (Wireshark Certified Network Analyst: Official Exam Prep Guide, by Laura Chappell). As mentioned before, the app won't be able to find many books printed before 1970 because they often don't have barcodes. That's not to say the book can't have been written before 1970—we're talking about year it was printed. Additionally, if your library has scrapped the book's jacket and the barcode doesn't appear on the actual cover, you may be out of luck.

Twice, it took more than one attempt to get the information, either due to low lighting conditions or the camera's inability to pull the barcode into focus in a timely manner, but eventually it worked. Here's an example of one of the citations in Chicago style:

The Editors of PC Magazine and Brian Underdahl. PC Magazine Technology Almanac 2004. John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2003.

Another weakness, as you may have noticed from the example, is that Quick Cite's references are sent as plain text, meaning text that should be italicized is not.

Some early app users complained in reviews that Quick Cite excludes from the e-mail the citation style that was selected. This is no longer the case. Every email contains that information, front and center, in all caps in the subject line, for example, "Your CHICAGO Citation."

I guess 7Cubed gave the people what wanted, but the e-mail still misses some opportunities to deliver a better experience. For starters, users have to copy and paste the information from the email into their documents, and this would be a much smoother process if multiple citations could be sent in one single e-mail. Additionally, I would like to see the subject line of the e-mail contain at least one piece of information from the citation, such as the author's surname (which could become unwieldy in combination with a "batch send" feature).

Scholar's Dollar
If you're staring down a tower of books and need citations for all of them, you can imagine the benefit of having Quick Cite. Rather than skimming the first few pages of each of book and then keying information into your laptop, you could flip over each book, one by one, and scan your way to a newly minted bibliography page. You'll still have to copy and paste, add italics, and manually enter them into any bibliography software that you're using, but think of it this way: if you didn't have to do all that, I'm sure 7Cubed would be asking a lot more than a dollar for this helpful academic app.

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