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CHAPTER 9: SCHOLARLY JOURNAL INDEXES, CITATIONS, ABSTRACTS, AND CITATION GUIDES This chapter describes scholarly
journals and their indexing, citations, abstracts, and the various ways to cite
your sources.
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Journal articles play a larger part in some areas of academic research than in others. Scientists and engineers, for example, rely more on journal articles for information than social scientists (e.g., economists, sociologists, psychologists, etc.). Humanists (e.g., philosophers, literary critics, musicians, etc.) tend to rely even less on journal articles, though many humanistic scholarly journals are published.
Thousands of scholarly journals are published every month. For this reason indexes are essential tools needed by experts to find research published in their subject area that might help them in their own research.
Indexes to scholarly journals are highly specialized. That is, they usually
focus on only one area of knowledge, for example psychology, physics, or
philosophy.
Access to these indexes is available only to subscribers, so you will need your BroncoWeb login if you wish to use the indexes from off-campus. But if you have a valid, current BroncoWeb login, an immense amount of research in scholarly journals that the library subscribes to can now be done from any computer connected to the Internet. An important new feature of more and more scholarly indexes is the inclusion in the index not just of citations and abstracts, but entire articles which can be e-mailed to yourself or saved to a portable memory device. A citation is defined as any information that uniquely identifies a publication by listing the title, author, volume, date, etc. Most research databases default to just showing generic citations when returning search results, such as the example above. An abstract is a short, usually one paragraph summary of a larger work which outlines the main points discussed in a journal article or document. When you search the databases you will find most of them provide search results in a brief citation (see above), and include title, author, source, date of publication, etc. If you click on the title of the citation you will be taken to the full bibliographic record of the article, listing additional information such as subject terms, the abstract (if available) and, if provided, the full text of the article. The text may be offered in HTML (the article text without pictures or graphics), PDF (a scanned image of the article as it appeared in print), a choice of both, or a link to a website that contains the article. Citing your work in a bibliography: Each resource you use or quote from, doesn't matter if it's print, electronic, or audiovisual, will have to be compiled in a list of works cited, or bibliography. Just as you list all the ingredients that went into making a scrumptious apple pie, so must you list all the books, articles, websites, etc., that went into creating your paper. They style in which you cite your paper will depend on your professor and your area of study. There are several standard manuals of style which dictate how a paper, journal article, or website ought to be cited. Style manuals also include a great deal of information on how the text is formatted, such as properly using quotations, punctuation, footnotes, and much more. The most popular style manuals are MLA, APA, Chicago, and Turabian.
The library has several copies of each style manual as well as informative guides to help you get started. There are also many university and publishing houses that offer style guide information online, such as Bedford/St. Martins and the Online Writing Lab (OWL) from Purdue University. Also, the library's Catalog allows you to compose your search results according to EndNote Citation format; this feature is available at the bottom of the page after each catalog search. Another approach is the fill-in-the-blank, web-based citation services from sites such as Citation Machine and the North Carolina State University Library's Citation Builder. These websites are useful for filling-in the information of the work you want to cite and automatically formatting it into MLA or APA. However, these online services are limited to simple and straightforward citation building, so if you have multiple authors or complicated volume pagination, please check the print manuals to be sure. Be aware that no system is perfect so you should check the results carefully to ensure accuracy. Click
on link to go to the Assignments page and print Assignment NINE |
Lower division research assignments usually require no more complicated or expert information than is contained in magazines and newspapers. But in advanced classes, instructors usually will tell you that they want you to get information from sophisticated, specialized sources. In other words, they want you to do research in
scholarly journals.
To determine if a journal is refereed, link to Articles from the Library website, click on Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, or use this
link -
