Citations are descriptions of resources. We create citations when we prepare a bibliography for a paper. They allow our readers to locate the same resources for themselves.
In an index, we find citations to journal articles. These citations provide the:
- title of the article
- author(s) of the article
- title of the journal in which it was published
- volume, issue, date of the journal
- page number(s) of the article
Citations can include more than that, but every citation must include this information because it's the information we need in order to locate a specific article.
See an example of a citation in our indexes tutorial.