CSU Extension

DOI

If you have something that looks like 10.1098/rstb.2008.0297, it is a Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

Add this "http://doi.org/" to the beginning of the DOI to make the DOI searchable on the web.

Journal Citation

If you have a journal citation, go to Find > Citation Finder on the Libraries homepage.

Journal Abbreviations

Finding the full title of a journal from the abbreviation:

Putting the abbreviation in the title field in the Citation Finder will find the journal.

For example, entering abbreviation "PNAS" into the journal linker gives us this result:

Is this a book or a book chapter?

Something like this (with two titles, a publisher name and location) are clues that this might be a book chapter reference. You can search Primo, the library's discovery tool, by the book chapter, or the book title.

Maximizing the wealth of nature by Terry L. Anderson (In) Accounting for mother nature : changing demands for her bounty  edited by Terry L. Anderson, Laura E. Huggins, and Thomas Michael Power.  Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Economics and Finance, c2008

Check your citation to make sure it is correct.

Sometimes you will have a citation that may not be complete, or it may not be correct. Use a database and the information you have to double-check the citation. The best science databases to use are:

Do you know you are looking for a journal article?

• (Clues:  You will see numbering like 14(2): 142-192, which means volume, number, page.)

Do you think you are looking for an article or maybe a book?

• (Clues: If you have a publisher name in the citation, it is probably a book. If you have something that looks like two titles, it is probably a journal article with title of the article and title of the journal.)

Do you think something doesn't seem just right about the citation?

• (Clues: Missing information, missing words, etc. Use one of the science databases to double-check the citation.)