Start-up’s app lets students create citations in seconds

One of the most gruelling parts of university life — referencing and citations — is being revolutionised by a British start-up’s app that can create a citation in seconds, and is now being backed by the world’s largest private education firm.

RefMe is a free app and website being used by students and researchers to create citations, reference lists and bibliographies as part of academic work — one of the most closely monitored areas of essay writing, with students penalised heavily for errors to stamp out plagiarism.

RefMe works by creating a reference or citation of any book or journal by scanning the barcode using a smartphone camera, or a website by typing in the URL. Traditionally, the process can take hours as details such as the publishing year and edition number need to be sourced from every book used, by hand.