Using Card Cutter

Installing Card Cutter

Card Cutter is a Chrome extension that helps with the research process. The name might be slightly misleading - it doesn't necessary help with the underlining and bolding parts that most people call cutting cards, but it is a huge help with the other formatting and citing aspects of finding evidence. Used effectively, it can standardize citations and make cutting cards much cleaner.

I don't know if it's available on other platforms, but you can find it on the Chrome Web Store here.

USING CARD CUTTER

The extension is pretty easy to use. The main part of the citation, after clicking on the button to open it up, is a set of fields that you can input text into. As indicated by the image, there's one for the title, author, source, date, and URL, which make up the citation part of the card. Unlike Cite Creator, this information isn't filled in automatically, but it's also easier to fill in missing information than directly editing the text of the citation itself. Additionally, there is a field for the card tag, where you can write down a summary of the part you're citing, and for the text block that you're actually copying-and-pasting from the article.

Creating cards

The other two fields are for the tagline of the card, which is a concise explanation of what the cited text is talking about, and the card text, which holds the directly copied-and-pasted text from the article. These are easy to complete, and unlike other methods, are automatically formatted for you. The resulting card can be moved into your research document or case.