Verifying Citations

What is citation verification?

Being able to verify citations correctly requires a specific set of knowledge and skills: 

• To be able to identify if a citation is complete or not
• To be able to identify what type of reference to be verified. Is is a book chapter? an article? a dissertation?
• To be able to identify the subject area or discipline of the reference
• To be aware of the variety of tools (online and print) that are available for citation verification and to be able to select the appropriate tool for verification
• To be able to use the searching and browsing features of these tools

Help Sheets and Other Resources

The following help guides provide information to help you through the citation verification process.

Is the Reference Complete?

This help guide uses Vancouver format to demonstrate the pieces of information needed for the following reference types: journal article, book, book section, technical reports, conference papers and proceedings, and dissertations/theses.

Citation Verification Strategies

This help guide provides a list of strategies for verifying citations: gathering information about the reference, determining the reference type, and selecting and searching tools.

Resources Used in Citation Verification

This help guide provides a listing of resources that can be used to verify citations of different reference types. Once a resource has been selected, consult the Library's list of guides for help with searching.