posted
I may be regretting taking this class this summer. It's been really hard. The subject matter isn't the problem, I'm enjoying it more than I expected but we have a research paper due next week and I just had chemo this week and don't see me being able to pull off a long trip to the campus library. Plus, the midterm is two days before we leave for Washington DC so I'm feeling a little overwhelmed.
So, I've been accessing info through the Alabama Virtual Library (a wonderful resource, I bow to the people who put it together and keep it going) but I have a question. If you access a source through the internet that is also a legitimate print source, do you cite it as a webpage?
Here's an example of a journal article I've accessed for my paper on Hawthorne's comparison of Anne Hutchinson to Hester Prynne:
quote:Burnham, Michelle. "Anne Hutchinson and the economics of antinomian selfhood in colonial New England." Criticism 39.n3 (Summer 1997): 337(22).
Okay, that's the cite - but when I accessed the source citation on the webpage it gives me this plus a lot of other info and an HTML address as so:
quote:Burnham, Michelle. "Anne Hutchinson and the economics of antinomian selfhood in colonial New England." Criticism 39.n3 (Summer 1997): 337(22). Expanded Academic ASAP. Thomson Gale. Alabama Virtual Library Remote Access. 25 May. 2006 <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC- Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&do cId=A20167523&source=gale&srcprod=EAIM&userGroupName=avlr&version=1.0 >.
That just looks really awkward to me. My pocket MLA style manual doesn't exactly cover this situation. It's an online class and I've got an email into the professor, but he says he won't be answering emails until Monday, and I wanted to finish the paper this weekend.
I'm hoping someone out there had a similar situation and can give me some advice. It's not a critical thing, I can always wait for the bibliography page until after I hear back from him, but I'm curious how some of you might have handled this if it came up.
Pixiest asked how I was doing in another thread - the answer is not good. With the pressure of school and getting ready for the trip I really need to feel good and I don't. My counts were bad again this week, they went ahead and treated me but had to give me a shot for my white blood cells that causes pain in some people and rarely, can cause severe bone pain. Yep, I'm the rare one - it really hurts. Enough that I just want to curl up and cry but can't. I do have some prescription pain meds but Lortab and Early American Literature don't mix.
Thing is, I don't want to withdraw from the class because I need something that's about me and for me right now. I really want to dedicte myself to finishing school and I'm tired of letting my cancer dictate every single thing in my life. I want to finish this one class, and get back to school full time in the fall. But I didn't know it would be so hard. I was planning on taking two classes - some of you here as well as my husband advised against it and I'm glad I listened and only signed up for one.
Edit: trying to make that url fit on the page better.
I forgot to mention - the insurance agent is telling me that the wreck I was in was obviously, not my fault, but it also doesn't matter that the guy behind me ran. Since we were at a standstill, it's the fault of the guy who made the first impact. Unfortunately, there were six cars involved in the wreck, two of them totaled, and he doesn't carry enough liability to cover it all. So looks like we have to pay our deductible anyway, and hope the insurance company can sue him personally to get the money back. Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
One caveat: save the URLS in a separate file. God forbid there's an accusation of misciting caused by poor virtualization, you will have access to where you cited from. Even better would be to save a copy of each web page you access.
In legal citation, everyone uses electronic sources citing to the printed volumes for professional work. Academic articles are written that way, but each such citation is checked against the paper copy before publication, just to be sure there wasn't a mistake in the citation.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Sheesh, if the Gale group expects people to actually include the url, they ought to at least have clean urls, almost everyone else can, and most things have a doi assigned now, so sheesh.
(Not that I disagree with Dag.)
Posts: 1621 | Registered: Oct 2001
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Why is a strange URL a problem? You don't have to type it. Copy, paste. Done.
Example:
Article in a full-text journal accessed from a database to which the library subscribes :
For works from a subscription service, like ProQuest Direct or Academic Universe, use the URL of the service's main page (if known). Also, if a library is the subscriber to the service, the name of the service and the name and city of the library should be included in the citation. When only the starting page number is provided, include this number, followed by a hyphen, space, and a period. See example, below.
Fox, Justin. "Who Wants to Be an Internet Billionaire?" Fortune 8 Nov. 1999: 40- . ABI/INFORM Global. ProQuest Direct. Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY. 15 Nov. 1999 <http://proquest.umi.com/pdqweb>
Posts: 262 | Registered: Feb 2006
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Pinky, its a problem because there are better solutions that leaving the url ugly. Note that in the url Belle posted they're passing several parameters in the url. This is easy to break, there are solutions that allow you to change the back end, without necessarily breaking the urls. DOI, as I mentioned is one such solution, but so is simply using a rewrite rule on the server so that the visible url is clean and contains only the information needed to lookup the article.
Only the relevent information is there: PRL -> Physical Review Letters v96 -> Volume 96 article e218303
Since this information uniquely identitifies the article in question, its much harder to break, and it supports changing the backend, without breaking the link.
Go back and look at Belle's link, can you identifiy what all of the parameters are? I couldn't.
I have to say that I disagree completely with your above example as well. If you cite a story from Fortune, you ought to cite Fortune and not Proquest. (Proquest has nothing to do with the actual article, so it doesn't need to be included, since you could just find the actual paper copy of it, and read the same article.) The only exception to this being if the article isn't the same as the published version, but thats a whole 'nother can of worms.
Posts: 1621 | Registered: Oct 2001
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Well, the professor actually did answer my email even though he said he'd be away from the computer.
He appears to agree with HollowEarth - as long as the cite allows him to identify the printed publication the journal was in, he doesn't need the URL and doesn't even need to know it was accessed in an online database.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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*nods* I always try to go by professor preference, but there are MLA rules for this sort of thing. Pinky's citation with the database used to access the article is actually one of the correct ways to cite an article accessed through a database. I know, I've seen it in my official MLA book. So it doesn't matter if someone disagrees, unless they're on the MLA board, or whatever it is, that makes these decisions.
There are also rules to cite internet sources that don't come from a database, but rather an internet site of some sort or another.
Personally, I often do what Belle's professor said and make my citations look like they came from a print journal.
Posts: 2880 | Registered: Jun 2004
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My husband is doing a lot of work with online sources right now for a class requiring tons of citations, and the teacher prefers APA format with this format for the citation at the end:
Authors, "Title of Article", Journal, date and issue, etc. [here's the relevant part] Accessed (date) at (persistent web link to cited material.)
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Yeah, you do need to be sure what the prof wants - I had one last year that preferred APA, but this guy speciically stated he wanted MLA.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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@HollowEarth: I agree, Belle's URL looks horrible. Do you really mean it when you say it's "SIMPLY using a rewrite rule on the server"? I can already be lucky that I know how to copy and paste!
However, my example is not MY example. It's from one of the internet sources about MLA rules. I didn't make that up! As already mentionend, the URL does not replace the bibliographical entry, it's just additional information. The URL itself only needs to direct the reader to the main page of the database, not to the actual article. After all, there is the search option, so the article can easily be found without the whole URL.
You know, it's not always possible, to read the actual article. If an article can't be found in a library around here, I can't pretend that I read it by myself, so I give the name of the database etc., too. Whatever. Maybe it's different in the U.S.
By the way, I haven't yet had two Profs with the same views regarding the format of a paper. And when it's about citing Internet sources and databases, they all seem to have their own priorities. Sometimes, it still seems to be a matter of aesthetics, even when they claim that they want you to stick to the given MLA rules. *sigh*
What I posted is not wrong; it's the way I give bibliographical information when the Profs don't give other directions. Whatever, I don't want to argue.
quote:Originally posted by Belle: Well, the professor actually did answer my email even though he said he'd be away from the computer.
He appears to agree with HollowEarth - as long as the cite allows him to identify the printed publication the journal was in, he doesn't need the URL and doesn't even need to know it was accessed in an online database.
quote:Originally posted by Pinky: @HollowEarth: I agree, Belle's URL looks horrible. Do you really mean it when you say it's "SIMPLY using a rewrite rule on the server"? I can already be lucky that I know how to copy and paste!
Its not something that you need to know; its faith that the major publishers can hire a compentent IT staff to run their online systems and provide these urls.
quote: However, my example is not MY example. It's from one of the internet sources about MLA rules. I didn't make that up! As already mentionend, the URL does not replace the bibliographical entry, it's just additional information. The URL itself only needs to direct the reader to the main page of the database, not to the actual article. After all, there is the search option, so the article can easily be found without the whole URL.
I didn't mean to imply that you had made anything up. I never did like the MLA people, too many picky rules about the punctation and all.
quote: You know, it's not always possible, to read the actual article. If an article can't be found in a library around here, I can't pretend that I read it by myself, so I give the name of the database etc., too. Whatever. Maybe it's different in the U.S.
Sure print versions of a lot of stuff are slowly going away so no its not different. My point was just that where you personally found it, doesn't impact the information needed to find it. (ie, your library catalog should point to Proquest, when you search for fortune.)
quote: By the way, I haven't yet had two Profs with the same views regarding the format of a paper. And when it's about citing Internet sources and databases, they all seem to have their own priorities. Sometimes, it still seems to be a matter of aesthetics, even when they claim that they want you to stick to the given MLA rules. *sigh*
What I posted is not wrong; it's the way I give bibliographical information when the Profs don't give other directions. Whatever, I don't want to argue.
Part of my distaste for these style guidelines is that as long as the information is there, you'll be able to find the source. So the exact form shouldn't matter. In my experience professors don't really care, and if they do they'll give tell you where to find the guidelines. This is likely different for people who aren't writing for science classes. (For instance, if we were told anything, it was to follow the rules for publishing a paper in an American Chemical Society journal.)
Posts: 1621 | Registered: Oct 2001
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I like the Chicago Manual of Style for citations and such. Chicago's approaches tend to be more flexible: "do this except when it doesn't make sense" (their grammatical guides also maintain a great sense of humor).
I've never had a professor demand I include URLs (for search or for the article in question) for all information garnered from the web (even if its a journal article). AFAIK there are no journals with such a requirement (and I read a fair number of journal articles), and I'm absolutely certain most papers any professor writes don't adhere to such a guideline. Any professor requiring that of students is far too fussy.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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There are journals that require dois for every cited paper. While these aren't technically urls, they can be used as such, so it sort of counts. I believe these are some biology journals, I'll try to look it up tomorrow.
Posts: 1621 | Registered: Oct 2001
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@HollowEarth: The Profs are probably a bit more relaxed as soon as you have proven to know the basics. Next semester, I can start with the main courses, but right know, the Profs are still quite pedantic. It's a bit like: "You have to know the rules before you're allowed to break them". Well, maybe it will be useful to know how to cite from databases some day in the futire.
Posts: 262 | Registered: Feb 2006
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There's a very practical reason for not using a complicated long url when you have found the article through your library's database, and that reason is that many times your university library is paying for access to those journals, and in the process of clicking through from the front page of the database, a username and password is sent or access is IP-authenticated. Many times, you can't simply skip the front page because your access doesn't get authenticated.
I work in a library, and that's the way some of the databases work. I have copied the direct link to an article I wanted several times before and tried to go back, but it wouldn't let me. I had to start all over.
Assuming that the professor has the same IP access that the library does, he'll probably need to go through the front of the database to look up your citation, so telling him exactly which database to use is helpful.
In addition, the URL might be dynamic anyway.
Posts: 2880 | Registered: Jun 2004
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The 'hard sciences' are the most likely source of exceptions, yeah. What I said wrt journals should mostly be taken as applying to social sciences/liberal arts (given that's most of the journals I read).
edit: though I would not call a DOI the eqivalent of a URL. A DOI has certain guarantees on it regarding meaning and persistence, and also stays within a reasonably constrained length by construction. That it can be transformed into a URL that leads to the content is beside the point, particularly because of the guarantees of meaning and persistence.
posted
Fair enough. I think I've read maybe 2 non-science journal articles, compared to a lot of science ones.
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![[Frown]](frown.gif)
It's been really hard. The subject matter isn't the problem, I'm enjoying it more than I expected but we have a research paper due next week and I just had chemo this week and don't see me being able to pull off a long trip to the campus library. Plus, the midterm is two days before we leave for Washington DC so I'm feeling a little overwhelmed.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Angst]](graemlins/angst.gif)
I can already be lucky that I know how to copy and paste! ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
Well, maybe it will be useful to know how to cite from databases some day in the futire.
