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Citation Guides

Reading and Using Citations

Bibliographies are a great source of information for your own research. If you've found a book or an article that you really like, always take a look at  the bibliography or works cited. You can use citations to find copies of the books and articles that are referenced.

A great way to do this is with UC Library SearchIf you have a citation and you want to find the book or article that it references, enter the title of the book or article in the search box. UC Library Search will search not only UCI's book catalog, but also the book catalogs of all 10 UC campuses as well as thousands of databases all at once. Another way to find articles from a bibliography is to use Google Scholar

Reading a Bibliographic Citation

When you encounter a bibliography, you will need to decipher the various parts of the bibliographic entry to do a search. Usually, the title of a book or journal will be in italics. The title of a journal article might be in quotations, but not always. In some scientific journals, you will see journal titles abbreviated. That's okay, because the title of the article won't be abbreviated, and that's what you need to put in the Citation Linker or Google Scholar to search for the article. 

Citation Table

Why we cite

Why We Cite by the UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center

How We Cite by the UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center