Re: GEN; SEC: Citing EBSCO, SIRS, etc

[Dan Robinson <dlrbnsn2@eclipse.net>]

For those who are working on the citations for electronic sources.
This area is in flux right now. If you check the archives you'll see
that the question comes up fairly regularly.  Also, the requirements
for the different formats have become looser as more types of
electronic documents find their way into the market.

First consider what you want to do with the citation.  In my opinion,
the citation tells the reader where to check the accuracy and
veracity of the citation.  Since the easy days of just citing a book
or journal are over here are some things to consider.

The name of the database used for the citation.  This is important
because there may be differences in the text among the different
vendors.  Did you find the Newsweek article in Readers' Guide
Fulltext or Infotrac (fill in the name of the correct  Infotrac
database here).

Format of the source. Is it an image, ascii text, html link or pdf
link? If it's an image, you probably have real page numbers. If it's
any of the other formats, you won't have real page numbers.  You
could count paragraphs but even that might not be accurate.

Date of the source, or date searched.  This is important. In addition
to the traditional date of a book or magazine article, the date of
the database should be recorded.  Anything electronic is subject to
fast and drastic change.  There could be error corrections or a
vendor could lose rights to a journal and have to remove it from the
database.

If the source is on the web, a weblink.  Here is where a major change
has occurred in the citation styles. Most of them used to require the
link to the article itself. But dynamic links are used in many cases
and can change depending on the search or starting point.  What I've
seen recently is a recommendation to put in the link to the site.
This is why the database is important. There should be enough
information that someone could link to the source's site, connect to
the correct database, do a simple search and verify the citation.

If it's not verifyable, then the date searched gives a clue for a
starting point to find out what happened.  I've done searches in our
databases to answer these types of queries from researchers and
professors and librarians.

Also, check the website for the vendor of your database, they may
give example of citations.

I realize that this is somewhat long... and that the citations will
also be long, but the days of easy answers and easy citations are
over.


Dan Robinson
Indexing Services
H.W. Wilson Company
Bronx, NY
drobinson@hwwilson.com
dlrbnsn2@ecllpse.net

On 22 Sep 99 at 17:04, Jean Anne Lowis wrote:

> I. too, am debating the correct format for my school's APA style guide. I
> have searched as Holly has, and find that there are many different ways of
> citing electronic sources, particularly, SIRS and Electric Library. The
> required elements seem to be more or less consistent, but discrepancies do
> exist in formatting, wording. Any comments would be appreciated. I like my
> handouts to be right too!
>
> Jean Anne Lowis
>

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