Below you'll find information about how to find, understand, and use citations in your library research. If you're looking for information on how to cite sources in for a paper, please see the library's Citing Sources, Research Tips, and Tutorials page.
- Definition, Purpose, and Uses of a Citation
- Where to Find Citations
- Anatomy of a Citation
- How to Find Articles at Oesterle Library from a Citation
- How to Find Books at Oesterle Library from a Citation
Definition, Purpose, and Uses of a Citation
A citation is a brief description of an item (such as an article or book) intended to make it possible for someone else to idenfity and locate it. Citations usually include the title of the work; the name of the work's author; the name of the work's publisher; and the date of publication.
When the author of a paper, article, or book includes a citation in a footnote, end note, works cited page or bibliography, it serves as a means for the author to prove that she had given proper credit for any sources she might have drawn on during her writing and research.
Readers of articles, books, papers, and other works can also use citations as a jumping-off point for research. If you've found a good article on a topic you're researching, chances are good that the article's works cited page will list other books and articles that will also be relevant to your research. Following the trail of citations in published works also gives you a chance to trace the intellectual history of the ideas discussed in the work you're reading, and to find out what the most important books, articles, and authors on a given topic might be. If you keep seeing the same author or book cited again and again in many different places, than it's a good sign that you've come across a very important work--and one that you might want to use in your own research, too.
Where to Find Citations
Probably the best place to find citations is in the footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, and works cited pages of articles, books, and other published works. Your textbooks for classes will also usually include lists of citations at the end of chapters or at the end of the book.
You can also find citations for millions of articles by using the library's databases, accessible from the Find Articles page. Though most of the library's databases offer the full text of numerous articles, they typically also offer citations for many more articles, which might be available in a different database or other publications.
Anatomy of a Citation
Here's an example of what a citation looks like, taken from EBSCOHost's Academic Search Premier database:
As you can see from the citation above, the title of the article cited here is "The Syrian Jabali Goat and Its Production System." The article has several authors, and it was originally published in a scholarly journal called Journal of Arid Enviroments.
According to the citation, the article's date of publication is "Apr2008"--which is a shortened way of notating that the article appeared in the April 2008 issue ofJournal of Arid Enviroments. Most issues of journals, magazines, and newspapers can be identified not only by their date, but also by their volume and issue numbers. The citation above indicates that the April 2008 issue of Journal of Arid Enviroments is Volume 72, Issue Number 4.
Not all citations will look exactly the same--but most will include the same kinds of information as this one, and in a fairly similar format.
How to Find Articles at Oesterle Library from a Citation
If you have a citation for an article, and would like to find its full text at Oesterle Library, the easiest, most efficient way to do so is to use the Browse journal, magazine and newspaper holdings feature on the Articles page.
You can use the "Browse" feature to find out what Oesterle Library's holdings are for any specific periodical for any specific date. If you enter a journal title into the "Browse" feature, you'll be able to definitively determine whether or not Oesterle Library has the specific article you're looking for, in any format (online, print, or microform).
Here's an example of what a Browse journal, magazine and newspaper holdings search looks like:
And here's what the search results look like:
The search results will tell you three things: first, does Oesterle library have this periodical in any format? In the case of The New York Times, the answer is yes.
Second, the results will tell you what format or formats the periodical is in, and which databases (if any) you'll find it. In the record above, you can see that Oesterle Library holds The New York Times in several different databases, including ProQuest Historical Newspapers and LexisNexis. By indicating the sources of "Freely Accessible Journals," the record is also telling you that the newspaper is available online for free. And when you see "Oesterle Library's Print Journals," you also know that the library holds physical copies of the periodical--in print, microfilm, and/or microfiche.
Finally, the results tell you what date range Oesterle Library holds for that periodical. In the example above, you can see that Oesterle Library has The New York Times through the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database from 1854 to 2004. If the article you're looking for falls within that date range, you're in luck: the library has it.
If you've found a match for what you're looking for in one of the library's databases, go ahead and follow the appropriate hyperlink from the search results page. For example: if you wanted to look at an article published in 1865, you'd probably want to click on the link to Proquest Historical Newspapers. When you follow that link, you'll find yourself in that database's search interface. Go ahead and enter the title of the article into the database's search box--you'll still have to run a search in order to find it, but now you already know that the article is available in that database.
If you discover that Oesterle Library doesn't have the article or journal that you're looking for, don't despair: we can still get it for you via interlibrary loan. For more information on how to request an article via interlibrary loan, please see our Getting Articles from Other Libraries page.
How to Find Books at Oesterle Library from a Citation
If you've found a citation for a book, you can look it up in CardinalCat, the library's catalog, in order to find out whether or not Oesterle Library has it. For information on how to find books, please see our How to Find a Book page.
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