Sub sections:
1. Interpreting citations
It is important to understand the various types of references or citations so that you can make the best use of resources such as reading lists, reference tools and online catalogues. This page will look at the way in which the most common sorts of material are cited:
- Books
- Chapters in books
- Journal articles
- Published conference papers
- World Wide Web documents.
These are not the only sorts of material that you will find in your search for information. In the case of some rarer types of material, you will need to seek advice from library staff, as these items can be difficult to identify from the citation alone.
The following examples of citations are in the Author-date system.
Books
Book citations look something like this:
The publisher (John Wiley & Sons) and place of publication (New York) indicate that this is a book. In library catalogues, you can search by the title of the book or the name of either of the authors (or editors). If there are more than three authors, most library catalogues include only the first one.
Chapters in books
Library catalogues do not consistently include details of the individual chapters in a book, although such details are frequently found in other reference sources. Citations to a chapter in a book usually follow this form:
A good clue to the fact that a citation refers to a book chapter is the word "in" before the title in italics.
In this example Stein is the author of a chapter within a book that has been edited by R.N. Longenecker. In most library catalogues this item will be listed by the editor's name and the title of the book. There may be no reference to the actual chapter by title or author name. Therefore, to locate this book, you must search for it by the editor's name or the book's title, not the chapter author or title. In the UNE Library Catalogue, a Keyword search in all fields will find some individual chapters as they are now added in a contents note for many titles.
Journal articles
Journal article citations follow this or a similar form:
Notice that a journal reference lists neither a place of publication nor a publisher. Journal citations are usually obvious because they include volumes and issue numbers and (usually) page numbers. To establish whether this journal is in a particular library, search the catalogue by the title of the journal. The title of the article and the name of the author (or authors) of the article are not searchable in most library catalogues since they relate only to part of the contents of the journal.
Published conference papers
Citations to conference papers are sometimes difficult to recognise. However, the citation below is reasonably clear:
Samuel, G. 1994, 'Tibet and the Southeast Asian highlands: rethinking the intellectual context of Tibetan studies', Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the 6th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, Oslo, pp. 696-710.
The giveaway, of course, is the word Proceedings. Unfortunately, not all collections of conference papers are so clearly identified.
As you have probably guessed by now, the title of the article and the author of the conference paper won't appear in most library catalogues. Search by the title of the conference (Tibetan Studies: Proceedings ... ) or, if your citation includes the name of an editor or editors, the name of the editor or of one of the editorial team. If you have an incomplete reference, try a keyword search using words from the conference name or the title of the collected papers.
World Wide Web documents
Citations to Web documents usually include an underlined section, like the one below:
Bespalko, S. J. 1996 (updated 9 October 1997, accessed 29 January 2001), Book Review: Wonderful Life:The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (Stephen Jay Gould), http://fgms.home.att.net/wondlife.htm.
The underlined section in the above reference is the document's Web address. If you launch your browser and enter this Web address in the box at the top of the browser window, the browser will take you straight to the document. We'll examine Web documents in greater detail later in Using the Web.
Summary
This page dealt with the following topics:
- how to distinguish between different types of citations
- what sorts of items can be readily found in a library catalogue
- why other sorts of material are not included in library catalogues
- how to locate these items by title searches or a search by editor name.
It's time now to look at the UNE Library Catalogue in some detail.
 | Self-test Try these quick self-test questions to assess what you have learnt from this module. |
