As you may be aware, different citation styles are followed depending on the discipline. Even in just the sciences, there's ACS (American Chemical Society), AIP (American Institute of Physics), and CSE (Council of Science Editors), to name a few. In fact, different publishers use different styles – and may even decide to use different styles depending on the journal in question.
Given a citation, how can you tell what type of source it is? Here are tips on what to look out for...
- Book - includes publisher name
- Journal article - includes volume/issue #
- Dissertation - includes university name
- Conference proceeding - includes conference name, location
- Patent - includes patent # that typically begins with 2 letters
- Web site - includes URL