LibGuides: UGS 302: Ethics of AI: Thinking About Good Systems / Jiao: Shortcut in research! Find sources from citations

This is a great tip for the rest of your research career!

Step 1: Find an article you like? Check the works cited/references/footnotes/bibliographies - where did this author get her evidence?

Step 2: Copy the citation - sometimes just the author and title is enough.

Step 3: Paste it into the search bar on www.lib.utexas.edu

Step 4: Found it? Email yourself a permanent link. Careful because links are not permanent unless they say so!

Libraries' "all in one" search
This is the main search bar and it's good at some things - one thing it's good at is finding items from citations, even if you don't have the complete citation.

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
This tool is very good at finding known items. Use the Cited By link for an item to see who has cited the source and where they have taken the argument more recently.
Google Scholar uses the popular Google search engine to enable searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar includes full text and citations.
Use this link to access Google Scholar, and see our Google Scholar Guide for information on using this resource.
If you encounter a warning about the security certificate when using the FindIt@UT tool in Google Scholar, you can learn more about that using this guide.

InterLibrary Services
If we do not own a book or an article, you can request it here. An article or book chapter takes about 3 days and a book that needs to be mailed will take about 5 days.

Decoding citations

All of the below citations are in different styles. Why are there so many different citation styles? I don't know. There are hundreds of them, believe it or not, and they all are built within a subject area that decides what elements are most important to those doing research in that area.

RAAT, W. Dirk, (2012) “World History, MesoAmerica, and the Native American Southwest by W. Dirk Raat”, History Compass 10/7 (2012): 537–548

I know this is an article because there are page numbers. The 10/7 refers to a volume and issue number. All periodicals (magazines, newspapers and journals) have volume and issue numbers.

When you see a title in quotation marks, it's likely an article...unless...

MORSE, Richard (1988) “Cites and People” Rethinking the Latin American City, edited by Richard Morse and Jorge E. Hardoy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press) pp. 3-20.

This has quotation marks and it also has page numbers - but it's not an article. It's a chapter from a book. Books that contain the work of multiple authors have editors. Books are published by presses in a particular city.

Here's a citation for a book with an author and no editors credited. You can see just one title in italics:

Obama, B. (2004). Dreams from my father: A story of race and inheritance. New York: Three Rivers Press.