Answered By: Dan Reboussin
Last Updated: Oct 29, 2014     Views: 92

Librarians aren't experts in producing citations (we work with the full range of styles our users bring to us, so it's hard to specialize). Copy editors for journals and other scholarly publishers are the experts for their own house styles (at UF, staff at the Graduate School Editorial Office are charged with maintaining citation standards for theses, dissertations, and ETDs). Librarians are heavy consumers of citations because we use them to locate the scholarly sources that our users need.

Notice the "cite this" green pencil icon cite this for all full records in the Library Catalog (it doesn't appear in the results list, but you may select the item title to see it in the full record). Clicking the icon will provide you with examples of the item cited in five major styles. More detailed information is available in the official style guides themselves, which are linked on the resulting page.

For further assistance, the Purdue University Online Writing Lab has several good guides available, including APA and MLA. Other similar guides can be found with a web search for the style most common for your discipline. In Anthropology, the scholarly association makes its AAA Style Guide available as a free pdf online.

By the way, JAbbr is one tool we use for the related problem of deciphering journal title abbreviations: http://amp.uflib.ufl.edu/jabbr/ (which is more often a problem with older European journals as well as some scientific journals and their prescribed citation styles).

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