Find Your Materials - Activity

Introduction | Prep | Presentation | Activity

Practice tracking down materials (20 minutes)

Explore the citations below and try to figure out how you would access the item. Search using your library’s catalog, Worldcat Links to an external site., and other search engines. Refer to ALL ABOUT: Finding Your Materials for helpful tips and methods.

Citation practices

Assume that key parts of the information you have about the document are wrong.

Citations can be misleading, incomplete, misattributed, misremembered, mistranslated, or even fabricated.

A book by Harlow Shapley called Rough Path to the Stars

Answer: Sometimes search engines and databases can be too precise with material titles. Incorrect titles can stem from a mistranslation, misremembering, or something else. Searching this author and part of the title may lead you to the correct book titled Through Rugged Ways to the Stars. Links to an external site.
Barlow, D., & Harrison, R. Positive power and influence program. Boston: Situation Management Systems, Inc., 1976.

Answer: Citations can be misleading. This seems to refer to an in-house publication from a training program. Documents like this would not be publicly available. A related item does exist as part of a collection of papers: Harrison, R. (1995). The collected papers of Roger Harrison(1st ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Links to an external site.

Data practices and librarian practices

Citation styles and cataloging practices change over time.

Publishers, vendors, libraries, and other information suppliers, vary in how they handle metadata and format their offerings.

Bull. Hist. Med. 1976 Spring;50 (1):61-72.

Answer: Citation styles and cataloging practices have changed over time. Abbreviated journal titles are now an outdated practice. Some catalogs and online searches will not be able to match an abbreviation to the full journal title. In those cases we can look up the title in a journal title abbreviation index Links to an external site..
Ciordia Vergara. “Speculative Encyclopedism in the Lower Middle Ages: Pedagogical Theory of the Medieval ” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 18 (January 2009): 295-309

Answer: When searching this, you will likely come across the article in Spanish. Since this citation provides the title in English, you might expect there to be an English translation. This may not always be the case.

Publishing practices

There is a great deal of variation and inconsistency in how materials are formatted, packaged, and disseminated.

This can happen with popular and trade publishers, academic publishers, or scholars themselves.

Mosely, 2016. The Future of Rwanda’s Past: Transitional Justice, Archival Practice, and the Remaking of History After Genocide. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

Answer: Publications can be embargoed Links to an external site., making the full text unavailable. Journals will often embargo the most recent year or so of their online material to compel sales of the print version.
Heinemann, J.A. and Bungard, R.A. 2006. Horizontal Gene Transfer. Encyclopedia of Molecular Biology and Molecular Medicine.

Answer: Titles can change. Try searching the author’s surname and the article title alone to check whether the journal title is in error. In this case, the Encyclopedia of Molecular Biology and Molecular Medicine was retitled “Reviews in cell biology and molecular medicine” as when it became an online resource. Sometimes, you will find clues about title changes in a catalog record, under “Variant title,” "Continues," "Continued by," or "Related Titles."

Additional practice - track down tricky citations

Is there a problem with these citations? Does anything seem odd? Try to identify the issue with each. Search within your library’s catalog, or within another database or search engine.

Haskell, Francis., and Nicholas. Penny. 2015. Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture : 1500-1900. Rev. and Exp. Ed. Turnhout: Harvey Miller / Brepols.

Answer: A record for this book is easily found in HOLLIS Links to an external site., but it is not available through any access services. A quick search online also brings up results for this book, however it does not seem to be available anywhere. This is an example of a book that was cataloged ahead of publication.
You’re trying to find a digital copy of a technical paper called Welfare Across Countries. One of the authors’ names was Jones. You’ve heard there’s a PDF online, but you’d rather refer to something more stable in your own work.

Answer: Scholars may write and publish more than one version of the same article and topic. This title was published twice. Once as a working document in 2010 Links to an external site. and again as an article in American Economic Review in 2016 Links to an external site.. A researcher may publish more than one article representing ongoing research on a single topic. Often these articles share the same (or almost the same) title.
Mechanism of Extracellular‑superoxide Dismutase DNA Methylation in a Hyperhomocysteinemia‑induced Atherosclerosis in a Mouse Model Int J Mol Med. 2018 Nov 15. doi: 10.3892/ijmm.2018.3990. [Epub ahead of print]

Answer: Some materials are withdrawn, or can disappear completely. This material was withdrawn after publication. There is very little trace of it online, and it doesn't exist on the journal site. In this case, you can try searching the DOI.

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