The Library also has guides to popular citation management systems:

Some of the most valuable resources for your research might not come from a direct search. Instead, you might find them by finding citations from other articles and books.

Scholarly articles and books will include a bibliography or a list of works cited. If an article or book was useful to you, look in its bibliography for other relevant materials that were cited by the author.

Useful citations also will appear in footnotes: If the footnote citations are incomplete, look in the bibliography/list of works cited at the end of the article.

Once you've found a citation, you can track it down in the Primo Library Catalog, Library's Easy Search, and  Library's Journal and Article Locator to find out if it will be useful to your work. The next section discusses the types of citations.

The first step to finding research sources is to identify the types of citations that you will see in a bibliography.

• A journal article citation often appears in a format similar to this example:

Note that the citation includes the name of the article's author; the article title (in quotation marks) AND the journal title; the issue number of the journal in which the article appeared (8.4 = issue number 4 in volume 8); and the page numbers for the article.

• A book (also called a "monograph") will be cited in a format similar to this example:

Note that the citation includes the author(s) name, the book title, and detailed publication information including the publisher and city of publication.

• A chapter in an edited book will be cited in a format similar to this example:

The key difference to note for a book chapter citation is that there are TWO sets of names: the name of the chapter author(s) AND the name(s) of the book editor (indicated by "Ed.").  This type of citation also includes two titles:  the name of the chapter (in quotation marks), and the title of the book in which the chapter is published.

There are many systems that are used to format citations, including MLA, Chicago, and APA.  And depending on the citation system, a citation may not include all of the information shown in these examples. But this summary has tried to highlight the core parts of the citations that usually will always appear, and this should enable you to identify the type of resource cited.

After you identify the type of resource cited in the citation, it's relatively simple to search for the item in question: If it's a book, search in the library catalogs--if not in the Primo Library Catalog, then search in I-Share or WorldCat and then place an interlibrary loan request. If it's an article, you can search for the journal in the library catalog, search for the online version in Library's Journal and Article Locator, or place an interlibrary loan request if the Library does not hold the journal in any format.