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Geography 2251
Anatomy of a citation (Chicago style)
Learning to read a citation is a skill that will serve you well. Citations vary somewhat based on the style and the type of material being cited but all contain very similar information.
An article citation in Chicago style looks like this:
Last name, First name. “Title of article.” Title of journal volume number, issue number or month (year): pagination, doi or URL (if applicable)
If you are searching, it is important to distinguish between the title of the article and the title of the journal.
If you need to search for the article, you start with the journal name - you can copy and paste that into Omni's Journal Search.
Omni will show you whether Lakehead has the journal and, if yes, what specific years or volumes are available. Check the dates and volume with the year and volume information in your citation.
If Lakehead has an online version of the journal that corresponds to the date/volume, you will see a link to click.
If Lakehead has a print version of the journal, you will see a location and call number along with the Library has field that tells you what years and/or volumes are available. Most print journals are on the 2nd floor of the Paterson Library.
You will combine the information in Omni (location & call number) with the information in your citation (volume, issue and page number) and that should bring you to your article.
A citation for a book or a book chapter is similar to an article citation but won't have a volume or issue number. Instead it will have publisher information.
Last name, First name. Title of Book. Place of publication: Publisher, Year of publication.
If no fulltext is available in the source you are searching, check Omni to find out if Lakehead owns the book and, if yes, the location and the call number.
Getting started
Before starting to actually search, take a few minutes and think about your topic.
You can use encyclopedias, dictionaries or handbooks (print or online including Wikipedia) to get some background knowledge of any terms or concepts unfamiliar to you.
Online reference sources like:
can also be useful. If your topic deals with an historical period, do you know the dates that correspond to that period? If a geographical region is mentioned, what present-day countries are included? Have any of those countries changed their names or boundaries and could that be relevant to your search? If your topic includes an event, expedition, piece of legislation or important work or book in the field, does it have more than one name or title (i.e. an official name and a commonly referred-to shorter title)? Are there specific people or institutions associated with your topic, either as participants or recorders or authorities in the field? These names may be worth searching as either authors or subjects.
Does your main topic term(s) have synonyms? Alternate spellings? Discipline-specific nomenclature vs. everyday language?
In research, it is quite rare to find all the relevant information with one single search. You will probably have to try different combinations of terms, possibly in different databases, before amassing a critical mass of sources. Doing a small amount of preparation work at the start can save you time down the line.
What is a peer reviewed journal?
A peer reviewed journal publishes articles that have been reviewed by experts in that discipline. Peer reviewed journals are almost always scholarly but not all scholarly journals are peer reviewed (although most are). Another term for peer review is "refereed".
How do you tell if a journal is peer reviewed?
1. A journal's homepage will often include a description that will tell you if it is peer reviewed or refereed.
2. Omni will indicate which journals are peer-reviewed:
3. Cabell's Scholarly Analytics includes the type of peer review used by a particular journal.
Searching for sources
Omni is the library's search tool. It includes both print and online resources.
Once you have searched for results, there are a number of facets that you can use to refine your results and ways to save search results.
Omni may not always be the best place to search - although it has a lot of coverage as the number of results can be overwhelming. It's possible that a really good article is far down the list and you might miss it. Sometimes it is better to use a subject-specific database - Geobase includes a lot of geography-related articles. Multi-disciplinary databases like JSTOR or Web of Science may also give good result. And three databases that tend to have older articles are JSTOR, HeinOnline and Periodicals Archive Online (PAO).