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Understanding citations:

A guide to deciphering citations found in databases and bibliographies; how to obtain the actual items.

If you have found a bibliography in a print source or a database, it is sometimes difficult to determine exactly what you have found. Is it a book or a chapter from a book? Is it an article from a periodical? Scholarly? Popular? Something else entirely? How can you figure out what you have found and how do you track down the item itself?

Each entry in a bibliography is called a citation; new entries are often double spaced or indented.
Take a look at some of these citations which have been diagrammed to explain their components. See if your citation resembles any of these.

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