Support : Publications : Chronolog Archives : October 2001

Search Solution: Verifying Citations

As any researcher knows, more than half of all citations have an error. It may be in the author's name, the title or, more commonly, the date. For this reason, one of the most common online searches is to verify the accuracy of a citation, whether to a journal article, book, conference paper, patent, or other publication. Dialog databases reflect a wealth of published material in every discipline, particularly in the past 35 years. Dialog is the perfect place, therefore, to go in order to verify a citation.

In Dialog, you can search on any of the key elements in a citation: author name, title words, date, source publication name, among others.

1. BEGIN an appropriate group of databases that would cover the publication in question.
2. SELECT the title or author, plus the year or date of publication.
3. TYPE results in MEDIUM or Format 3 in order to get the complete citation.

Example 1:  I have been asked to locate a government report about retroviral sequences in breast cancer. The author's name is Walsh.

Example 2:  In this example, we use the EXPAND command to view author names and journal names.

Example 3:  If the publication is really obscure, you can try scanning all databases using DIALINDEX®.

Note: We are not interested in copyright registrations, so we confine our searching to the databases with articles.

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