Site Questions
Format Questions
Accounts and Saving Work Questions
Other Questions
Yes! GoBiblio is completely free. All of our formats and source types are available to everyone, everywhere. We want to make bibliographies more accessible for everyone.
GoBiblio is a completely free site and the product of a small business with bills to pay, so we are supported by ads. We continue to develop the site to make it work better for all of our users, and so we hope you won't mind the advertisements that help support us.
Great question with many answers!
GoBiblio is not currently looking to hire. However, it never hurts to ask. If you think you might be able to contribute to our company and would like us to consider bringing you on board, feel free to contact us at info@gobiblio.com.
Most teachers and publications will tell you which style they prefer, so you should use the one you are told to. APA is common in the sciences. MLA is most common in the humanities and has become dominant in American high schools. Chicago/Turabian is also very popular in the humanities and social sciences.
If you're free to choose your own style, we recommend Chicago/Turabian for most writing as it is a clear and intuitive style with a long and distinguished history; for writing in the sciences, we recommend APA as it is best suited to the needs of scientific writing.
We currently support MLA, APA, and Chicago/Turabian. While these are the most common formats for high schools and colleges in the US, we are planning to add support for more formats like Vancouver, BibTex, CSE, AMA, and more. Let us know which formats would be the most helpful for you.
Harvard style is not a standardized citation format (and it is not affiliated with Harvard University). Rather, it is a generic term that refers to any citation format that follows the Author-Date convention. APA is the Harvard style which we support on GoBiblio.
Our Chicago/Turabian format type accommodates both styles, which are closely related. The Turabian manual is a condensed guide based on Chicago and geared more towards the needs of students. Meanwhile, The Chicago Manual of Style is far more comprehensive. We use both; in the rare cases when there is a difference between the recommendations of these two style guides, we provide a note to guide you.
MLA 7 is the most recent version of MLA style. It introduced some significant differences from the previous edition, most notably a much-improved handling on internet sources and the use of italics instead of underlining. MLA 6 is an outdated format which we do not recommend using. We provide limited support of major source types with MLA 6 as a convenience in case you have a teacher or circumstance that requires you to use it. However, many web sources and less common source types are poorly handled by MLA 6 and we have chosen not to support those types.
By registering a free account, you can save and manage multiple bibliographies to access another time, and you are never in danger of losing your work due to computer difficulties, power outages, and the like. You can even work on more than one bibliography simultaneously in different tabs. It also makes it a lot easier for us to provide you with individualized support if you have questions or problems, and we plan on introducing additional functionality for users.
Your citations are automatically saved whenever you click "Go!" If you have an account (which is totally free) and are logged in, your work will be saved whenever you click "Go!" or create a new bibliography, and whatever you don't delete will remain yours forever. In addition, you will be able to save and work on as many whole bibliographies as you wish!
Once you register an account, you can save multiple bibliographies and can even work on different bibliographies simultaneously in different tabs while you are logged in. If you are not logged in, you are limited to one bibliography at a time.
If you make a mistake while making changes to an existing citation and want to discard your changes, just click any of the source type buttons on the left to refresh the form. "Go" is the only button that will save changes to the fields you are filling out.
Some of the details you can include in a citation are optional or usually not applicable (for example, most books do not have a volume number). We keep these details out of your way under the "Show Advanced Details" button since you usually won't be using them.
We do hope to introduce a feature that allows you to enter just a little bit of information about your source in order to produce a completed citation. The idea is that this will save you even more time—no need to type in all the details for every source. However, the problem with auto-fill on other sites is that the data is often inaccurate, incomplete, or incorrectly formatted and you usually have to go through and correct the citation anyway. (Have you ever downloaded a song that had the correct title, but the wrong artist; or only had the track number but no song title? You don't want that happening in your bibliography.) So we want to make sure that if we offer an auto-fill feature, it will be a complete solution that actually saves you time.
While we were researching citation guidelines, we found that the distinctions between online, print, and database were not as severe as other sites have made them out to be. In fact, we noticed that separating them out often forces an additional, unnecessary step into the process of entering information to site a source. In all places possible, we have optimized for speed and ease of use, and we've simply found that other sites with this functionality were more complicated and more difficult to use than they had to be. So in fact, most of the time, we do not contain fewer options when it comes to the citations we share in common with others; we've just streamlined so that they aren't as bothersome!
Interested in hearing about our future plans, like an ad-free service for a low cost? If you'd like to stay informed on developments like these, you can join our spam-free emailing list at gobiblio.com/splash, or follow us on any of our social networking below.
Fear not, we promise to provide more answers! Just drop us a line at info@gobiblio.com; we would love to hear from you.