The most important first step when creating a bibliographic citation is to correctly identify the type of source you are citing. Online sources often look and act similarly, but they are not all the same!
- A book is a physical printed object you can hold in your hands.
- An eBook is a digitized version of a book. You would access it through a website such as Project Gutenberg or Google Books, or on a platform like Kindle, Libby, or Sora. (Note: Even though books you access through databases such as eBook Central or Gale eBooks are called "eBooks", you need to treat them as works from a database, too. If using NoodleTools, select "database" first.)
- A journal article is published in a scholarly or academic journal, and you probably found it in a database such as JSTOR or ProQuest Research Library. You might also find a journal article on the open web using Google Scholar. Journal articles have a rather narrow focus, and they will have publication titles and issue information in addition to article titles. Journals are published periodically (annually, quarterly, monthly, etc.).
- A website is an online resource that you probably found using a search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo. Most sources you will find on websites you will cite as a webpage.
- A reference source could be in print or online. Often these look and feel like books, but they're cited a bit differently. You can tell you're looking at a reference source if it has relatively short entries on a variety of topics. The title may include words like "encyclopedia", "dictionary", or "atlas".
All of these guidelines have exceptions, so if you're not sure what kind of source you have, ask!
