Research Guides: Best Practices

There are several reasons why it is important to cite your sources properly.

• It is important to give credit to the person or group who discovered or created that information.
• It allows your reader to find the source later if she wants to read it herself.
• Citing experts gives credibility to the argument of your paper.
• Proper citing indicates that you did a thorough job researching your topic.

Popular Sources

• Examples include: newspapers and magazines like The Washington Post or The Economist.
• Written by journalists. Journalists are good writers and researchers, but they are not necessarily experts in the topic they are writing about. 
• Written for a broad audience. 
• Editors determine what is published. 

Peer Reviewed (sometimes called Scholarly or Academic

• The critical distinction is that articles are evaluated by other experts before they are considered for publication.
• Examples include journals like Nature or The Journal of Sociology.
• Written by experts
• Written for other experts in the discipline and also students.
• Include citations, like footnotes and a bibliography.

Scholarly Sources

• Scholarly or academic sources are also written by experts in their field, but they are not necessarily evaluated by other experts before being published.  

There are guidelines of what to include and in what order for every citation style.  Here are the basics for the two most common sources.

For an article: 

• author
• article title
• name of the journal, newspaper, or magazine
• publication year
• volume & issue
• page numbers
• DOI or stable URL if accessed online

For a book: 

• author
• title of work
• publication year
• city
• publisher's name

A subject heading or a descriptor is a tag used to describe the article. These tags come from a list and reflect the terminology discipline of the database. (e.g. In medicine you search myocardial infarction not heart attack.)

What are the benefits?

• Your results will be more on topic
• You often find more when you use the terminology of the discipline

How do you figure out which terms are a subject heading?

• They are usually near the abstract of the article and are clickable
• Before you search, use the Thesaurus link on the database homepage to look up your topics

What if you don't find one?

• Not all words are subject headings
• Be creative, look for synonyms 
• Ask a librarian for help