Citing sources

Readers of your research paper may want to follow up on some of the ideas you present.  You help them do this by "citing" where you found the information in a list of sources which may be called a "Works Cited" or "References" or "Bibliography" depending on what style manual your instructor wants you to follow.

If your search for information is more of a personal nature (such as finding out more about a disease that one of your relatives might have, or getting comparisons of various digital cameras to help guide a future purchase), you STILL want to keep track of where you found it even if there's no instructor requiring you to.  The relative may want to investigate further into the sources you uncovered...a salesperson may ask where you read the review of a particular camera.  Adding  citation details to any photocopies you make (of pages from books or periodicals) is a good habit to get into.

The details you need for a useful citation depends on the format of the material you found.  For a book, most style manuals will require the author (or editor), the title, the place of publication (just the City if it's well known), the publisher, and the year it was published. 

For an article found in a journal, you will need the authors' names (often several scholars collaborate), the title of the article, the full name of the journal (some indexes only give abbreviations--you'll need to expand that to the full journal name), the volume number--and issue number (if any), plus the date (or season--if quarterly) and page numbers (beginning and ending--if listed) filled by the article.

For an article from a magazine, the details required include the author's name (if one is given), the title of the article, the title of the magazine, and then enough date and paging information so that another researcher could locate the same article. 

When you use a database (like EBSCOhost's Academic Search Premier or Gale's General OneFile) that provides "full-text" of articles, then you also need to include which database captured that full text and the subscriber information (for example, Grossmont College Library, El Cajon, CA).  This lets the reader of your paper know that you did not have an actual print issue of the periodical in hand when you located the information (since you accessed it electronically).

Students registered for classes at Grossmont College can access a variety of databases.  On campus, the database companies recognize the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer and open the databases for searching.  When using any computer connected to the Internet from off campus, your IP address will NOT be recognized so you'll need to enter both your username and password before you'll be connected to the host computers.

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