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In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can get citations quickly and easily for books and articles using the WorldCat catalog as well as
using an article or research database. You might be familiar with some of the citation
management software programs like RefWorks or EndNote. These are what you use to keep track of your citations in a single account, with
folders, and you can share them with others, as well as automatically generate bibliographies in the format of your choice.
But sometimes, you just want a quick and easy solution, so that’s what I’m going to show you.
For example, your syllabus might have a book that you need to cite in a paper. Or, maybe you’ve already found one in the catalog that you’d like to
use in your bibliography. As an example, let’s say that I’d like to find a
citation for the book, Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. Once I find the book in the catalog that I’m interested in citing …
I click on the cite tool and a little window pops up. From here, this is also the place where you’d export to Refworks.
But what I need to do now is just click on the button, and here I have it – the MLA format which I can copy and paste (the citation) into my paper.
Note that editions can vary, and you can view different editions using the link here.
Various databases have similar tools as well. I’ll show you just one, under Articles and Research databases…
I will go to Academic Search Complete. Here, I will do a search on the author, Thomas
Pynchon. Seeing the results, I chose an article that I like.
Different article databases do this differently, but in this particular one, you can see the cite button here on the right-hand side.
Now you can see I have a list of different citation formats to use. For example, if I want to use the APA style, I can just copy and paste.
Keep in mind that different databases have a different look and feel, and not all will have similar tools. But, a good number of them do, so you
should definitely check it out.
And don’t forget, if have any questions or ever get stuck, don’t hesitate to contact a librarian.