During a lecture (and a separate presentation) my instructor told us about bibliographic software, how it composes references automatically and is able to correctly cite articles in many formats. The software is freely available to everyone.
However, many others did not use it and were penalized on incorrect formatting when the assignment was due. Why would one not use software to compose references and citations? Is there advantage in learning how to cite articles manually?
All bibliographic software has a learning curve. You have to invest time and energy up front to learn the system and set up your database, and only reap the benefits later in the decreased amortized cost of maintaining correct citations.
If somebody doesn't think the tradeoff will be worth it (e.g., thinks they "aren't good with computers" or doesn't think they'll write many papers that the software would be useful for or is in a rush and isn't thinking about the long term), then they may manage a bibliography by hand.
For example, I'm a devout LaTeX/BibTeX user and would never consider doing something by hand---except that I have done so on a few occasions when forced to use an incompatible format where it wasn't worth setting up a new toolchain (e.g., putting a few citations at the end of a PowerPoint deck).
free citation manager is a Wikipedia list including JabRef, and result #13 is jabref.sourcefourge.net. However, since you say you found the program to be broken, I retract my comment - I guess it's not so easy to use after all. Granted, JabRef is hardly the only software or the best one.
Commented
Oct 18, 2014 at 21:23
I can think of at least three real-world advantages we gain by learning how to cite articles manually:
It compels us to become familiar with the syntax and form of citations, which makes references to articles easier to read and parse ... something that we all still have to do manually.
If you only need to jot down or reference one article you can do so without troubling with software tools.
By knowing how citations should be formatted, you are in a position to recognize errors and correct them (i.e. you can tell when your bib software malfunctions).
Pocket calculators are cheap, reliable, and widely available. Why do we insist on learning addition? The answer is, there are a lot of times you might want to use addition and you don't always want to depend on a calculator for that.
Of course we should take advantage of software tools for compiling references and bibliographies, but this is not always viable or always necessarily better than doing it manually unless we can assume that bibliographic software:
In my experience, all three of these assumptions break down much more often than one would like. For instance, it might be difficult and very frustrating to make a small change to a standard format in your bib software, which is required by the journal or funding agency you need to work with.
I think is the type of things you need to do by hand once, in order to know the basic idea of it. After that it should be left for computers to do, just like determinants or matrix multiplication.
Doing it by hand is extremely time consuming and prone to errors. There are too many citation styles for anyone to master them anyway, even within a specific field.
This is just another thing better left to automated algorithms.
