Following footnotes is one of the most important aspects of scholarly research. Academics use footnotes to provide background information and evidence for their arguments and to position their work in the scholarship of their field. By finding and reading the sources cited in footnotes, you can learn more about a topic, check the author's interpretation of primary sources, and form a better understanding of the scholarly conversations and gaps in research within the field.
There are distinctive features of a citation (highlighted in red below) that help you to determine what type of source it is:
Books
Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited. New York: Verso, 1997, 17.
The distinctive feature of a book citation is the publishing place and name of the publisher.
Journal Articles
Ilya Bodonski, "Caring among the Forgotten," Journal of Social Activism 14, no.3 (1989): 117.
Journal article citations have a title enclosed in quotation marks as well as volume and issue numbers. Instead of volume and issue, magazine and newspaper article citations have a month and year or full date.
Essays in Edited Collections/Book Chapters
Craig H. Roell, "The Piano in the American Home," in The Arts and the American Home, 1980-1930, ed. Jessica H. Foy and Karal Ann Marling (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 194.
While book chapter citations have features that look like book and article citations, the distinctive elements are the words "in" and "ed." for editor.
For Books
Search the library catalog for the author and/or title. For more precise searches, use the Browse Search option. If we don't own the book, click the "Search other libraries" link under the search box to borrow from another library.
For Articles
Strategy 1: search the library catalog for the article title or use citation linker.
Strategy 2: search the library catalog for the journal title. Look for the year the article was published as part of the holdings.
If we don't have the article, you can request a scan through interlibrary loan.
For Book Chapters
Search the library catalog for the editors or the title of the book (the title in italics); searches for the chapter author or title may not work. If we don't own the book, click the "Search other libraries" link under the search box to borrow it from another library or use interlibrary loan to request a scan of the needed chapter.
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