Reading Citations

Can you read a citation? Can you tell a book citation from an article citation?
Can you determine the title of a work from the citation, in order to find it? Do you know where to look for it?
On this page are some helpful hints and practice citations.

(Note that the citations on this page use the APA style.)

Clues to recognizing citations for books and journals:

• What's in italics (or underlined)? That should be the title of the main work - the book or journal.
• What's the title?
  • If there's a single title, it must be a book.
  • If there are two titles, one in italics and one not italicized, it's a smaller part of a larger work - an article from a journal or a chapter from a book. An article citation ALWAYS provides the title of the journal it's from.
• If it says "In" and "Ed.", it's likely a section or chapter from an edited book - each section can have a different author, but the editor(s) pulled the works together to make a book. In this case, you'll see two author sections - one for the author of the section/chapter and one for the editor of the book. The two authors are the same only when s/he is the editor of the entire book and the author of a section.
• Is there a volume/issue number? Journals have volumes and a volume number is included in the citation. Sometimes issue numbers are also included.
• Are there page numbers? Page numbers mean it's either an article from a journal or a section of a book.
• Is there information about the publisher? Book citations include the publisher's name and location; journals don't include publisher information.

Practice

Look at the following bibliography and determine which citations refer to books and which refer to journals.

Baxter, J. (2002). A juggling act: A feminist post-structural analysis of girls’ and boys’ talk in the secondary classroom. Gender and Education, 14, 5-19. Journal or Book?

Bettis, P. J., & Adams, N. G. (2003). The power of the preps and a cheerleading equity policy. Sociology of Education, 76, 128-142.
Journal or Book?

Brown, L. M. (2003). Girlfighting: Betrayal and rejection among girls. New York: New York University Press.
Journal or Book?

Duits, L., & van Zoonen, L. (2006). Disciplining girls’ bodies in the European multicultural society. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13, 103-117.
Journal or Book?

Pomerantz, S. (2006). “Did you see what she was wearing?” The power and politics of schoolgirl style. In Y. Jiwani, C. Mitchell, & C. Steenbergen (Eds.), Girlhood: Redefining the limits (pp. 173-190). Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Black Rose Books.
Journal or Book?

Pomerantz, S. (2007). Cleavage in a tank top: Bodily prohibition and the discourses of school dress codes. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 53, 373-386.
Journal or Book?

Shalit, W. (2007). Girls gone mild: Young women reclaim self-respect and find it's not bad to be good. Random House.
Journal or Book?

Mitchell, L. (1999). Combining focus groups and interviews: Telling how it is; telling how it feels. In R. S. Barbour & J. Kitzinger (Eds.), Developing focus group research: Politics, theory and practice (pp. 36-46). London: Sage.
Journal or Book?

Navigating to the Book/Journal/Article

Once you have a citation you know what you're looking for, making it easier to find. You'll know which database to search and which title to look for.

 
Explanation

A library catalogue (TOPCAT or RACER) tells you which books and journals are in the library.

• Search for a book by its title. Get the call number for it.
• Search for a journal article by the journal title. TOPCAT lists the call number and each volume we own. Your citation provides the volume, issue, and page number for your article. (If you don't find the journal in TOPCAT, you might still find it in the Journal Titles Available Online.)

 

The list of Journal Titles Available Online tells you which online journals are available from the library. The majority of our journals are online.

• Search for a journal article by the journal title. Once you find the journal, navigate to the volume, issue, and page number provided by the citation. See Navigating to Online Articles for more details.
• Don't look for books here. See the webpage for Finding E-Books.

   

An index of journal articles provides citation information about individual articles - the same information you already have from your citation. It may also provide a link to the full text, but not always. Very rarely will it find full text that isn't listed in the library catalogue or Journal Titles Available Online. This is an unnecessary step if you already have a citation and you're wasting your time.

For more information on finding books and journals in the library, see the Library Skills Tutorials or the webpages Navigating to Online Articles and Finding E-Books.