Citing Insights was developed by students working at the Cal Poly Humboldt Library, thanks to funding from CSU Graduation Initiative 2025. The project began in the spring of 2019, with the Citing Insights Team of Cindy Batres, Elizabeth Lujan, Verja Miller, Kyle Smith, and Mitchell Walters, working with Cyril Oberlander, Library Dean, to develop open source software designed to streamline assessment of students' information literacy and other skills. It was released on Pi Day, March 14, 2020. You can find and download Citing Insights Beta at: github.com/hsu-library-project-x/citing-insights-beta

Cyril Oberlander, Library Dean shared, “Thanks to one-time funding from the California State University Graduation Initiative 2025 and the support of the campus, we employed amazing students to build Citing Insights. This software provides much needed automation to support assessment of information literacy and other competencies, including the evaluation of sources of citations used in student papers featuring standard or customized rubrics.”

What can Citing Insights do? By uploading one or a set of papers, Citing Insights automatically detects the citations in the paper, enabling one click access to the sources of citations via Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, or a library’s discovery system. You can also evaluate the paper and citations using the built in Information Literacy or Critical Thinking Value rubrics from the AAC&U, or create and edit your own rubrics, and even add annotations. Lastly, you can output the results for assessment, or provide feedback to students.

The Library internships and project-based student employment opportunities are designed to empower effective learning to solve challenges faced by higher education and the community at large. One of the key questions for Citing Insights is how can we make assessment easier. The first phase of development for Citing Insights answers that question by reducing the workload of assessment. Once the full version is released, the next version of Citing Insights will support students research and writing; answering our second key question: how can we assist student research and writing anytime and anywhere? Building this tool will be as ambitious as the supporting assessment with automation software.

Ben Miller … “This experience at the library improved our ability to work in teams, develop a product to meet client needs, and expanded our knowledge – we had to acquire new programming languages, learn project management and agile development skills… working at the library was an invaluable experience.”

The Citing Insights team and Cyril Oberlander, Dean of the Library, co-presented Citing Insights and student software development projects, at the American Library Association Annual Conference (LITA program) in Chicago June 2020, showcasing the importance of engaging students in solving grand challenges. Cyril adds “I am excited to see the additional features planned for the Version 1 release, advancing assessment features for groups and adding inter-rater reliability norming and analytics will significantly make assessment easier and more powerful. Libraries are innovative engines in higher education, as we engage students in project-based learning, we provide practical and powerful strategies to rapidly prototype, test, effectively iterate, and thereby shape the future of higher education.”