Reference - Topics

A librarian's hardest reference question comes from someone certain they already know the answer Britannica ended its print edition in 2012 after 244 years APA and MLA disagree about almost everything a first year paper needs and departments pick one A dictionary entry needs pronunciation and part of speech and usage labels not just a definition Verifying a quotation means finding the original page and not the secondhand source AI chat answers pull more traffic away from encyclopedia sites than any rival encyclopedia did Citation chaining backward through a bibliography finds better sources than keyword search Datasets get cited with a version number and an access date because they keep changing The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is peer reviewed and free and most departments cite it Chicago style offers notes and bibliography for humanities and author date for sciences Gale and Oxford reference works behind a paywall are still what public libraries buy An encyclopedia entry opens by defining its subject because the genre is descriptive and not argumentative A hospital information desk can tell you where a department is and cannot give medical advice Citing a work you only read in translation is acceptable if you name the translator Directory assistance 411 still exists and costs a few dollars per lookup Style manuals disagree about how to cite a website with no author and no date Zotero stores the PDF alongside the citation and Mendeley has belonged to Elsevier since 2013