Category: UCI Journals

If you’ve been applying Bluebook rules recently, you might have thought to yourself “I bet a computer could do this so much more quickly and easily.” And you would have been correct! So I offer here a couple of notes about using technology to help with citation-formatting, especially for journal articles and books.

• Google Scholar now has automagic MLA, Chicago, and APA-style citations. From the Google Scholar Blog, “To copy a formatted citation, click on the “Cite” link below a search result and select from the available citation styles.”
• Did you know there are specialized browser and desktop tools to help manage citations? The UCI Libraries has a great chart that compares features of “Bibliographic Management Software.” (Bluebook is supported by all of the examples on the chart!) (The Law Librarians here are big Zotero fans. It’s fantastic to look through articles and, every time you see a good one, just click a button to have your browser plug in the title, author, and other relevant details into a list of citations. When you’re done with the research, you highlight the citations you want for a bibliography and export them in whatever format you want.)

We are truly living in the future.

Would you like to get an “exact copy” of a journal or newspaper article from a print title that we don’t have on campus? You have options! One way to do so is to use the UC-eLinks “Citation Linker” form for Articles. Another way is to find the journal in Melvyl (uci.worldcat.org) and click the orange Request button. (When it’s working correctly, Melvyl should give you the same eLinks form—one that says Locate the article from your citation.)

This form asks for all the details we’d need in the Law Library if we were going to, say, call another library and ask them nicely if they’d make us a copy and send the PDF along? (Or, failing that, a microform or hardbound version.) This includes author, title, and page number, in addition to the name of the publication and the date.

So even though you can continue without filling in the whole form, you shouldn’t skip over the details. We are more likely to be able to get what you need quickly if we have all the information we need from the start!

If you need help working with an incomplete citation or using the ILL Request forms, please stop by the Reference Desk. Reference hours are Mon-Fri, 9-5.