GSU Library Research Guides: Mining References: Citational Practice

The Politics of Citation: Names, Texts, Theories

“Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow. In this book, I cite feminists of color who have contributed to the project of naming and dismantling the institutions of patriarchal whiteness”

- Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 17.

"What might it mean for Black feminist scholars to say they are theorists in the tradition of Anna Julia Cooper or Fannie Barrier Williams, or Ida B Wells or Patricia Hill Collins or Joy James, in the same way that scholars are allowed to claim that they are Marxist, or Freudian or Foucauldian, or Kantian, or Spinozan? What might it look like to be Cooperian or Wellsian in our approach to the study of Black women's lives and Black intellectual thought?"

- Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 3.

Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed
In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique--often by naming and calling attention to problems--and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions--such as forming support systems--to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.
Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper
Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

Be Mindful....

How publications are

cataloged (either in databases or library catalogs -- inadequate or misleading subject headings, errors in records)
distributed/circulated (which databases index/include a particular journal? how do presses' reputational politics and even marketing strategies affect awareness of book publications? what are the reputational politics of online-only publications and/or publications that resist or challenge the standard peer-review model?)
canonized (which books/articles are identified as "classics" or "must-reads"? which are included on exam lists?)

can affect whether or not they are cited. Be mindful of who and how you cite.

Using BOTH keyword and subject-term searches can help you uncover materials that might be obfuscated by these systems.

Be creative with your keywords. As you read, be mindful of words/terms that might be useful for more inclusive searching.

Why cite?

Give credit to the ideas, words, and works of others

Allow readers to find your sources

Avoid plagiarism

Online Style Guides

The Research and Citation section of Purdue University's OWL site also includes helpful quick overviews and sample citations from the main citation styles (including Chicago, MLA, and APA)

Zotero

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use, open source tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources.

Zotero works with your browser! But it will only work with Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.

See the library's Zotero research guide for help with downloading and useful tips.

I can also help get you started with Zotero! Email me at janderson73@gsu.edu if you have questions about Zotero, or would like to schedule a Zotero training session with.

For additional information, see the Zotero website.

Endnote

EndNote is a program for managing bibliographic citations. It can automate much of the work of organizing and formatting citations and bibliographies in your writing. EndNote can connect to online sources such as GIL and article databases, output results in over 1,000 different bibliographic styles, and more.

Please see the library's EndNote research guide for information on how to download and use the software.

Don't want to download the software? Use EndNoteWeb, the Web-based version that allows you to access your citations from any computer, any where, any time. .

"Cited References"

Once you start to find relevant books/articles for your work, look at the citations in those sources. This will help you:

Understand whose work has influenced that author's work
See how the author has used those sources to construct their argument
Find other sources for your own work

Some databases will include links to items cited within an article (look for a link to "Cited References" -- this can be helpful, but clunky. You can also look up a citation in a database using Advanced Search and putting the title in one box and the author in another.

Not sure what discipline a cited article is in? Try using the library's Advanced Discover Search (see link on the library's homepage), which will let you search for a particular title + author across many of our databases.

"Cited By"

It can also be useful to see who cited a particular article or book that you've found valuable. If you look up a particular article or book in these two sites, you'll find, as part of the item's record, a link to items that cite that source. This lets you look forward to see who was influenced by a particular work. (You can also use these sites to see who has cited your work -- which you may need down the road for promotion/tenure purposes).

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Web of Science provides seamless access to the Science Citation Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index as well as Book Citation Index and Conference Proceedings Citation Index.

Note: Web of Science tends to be spotty on humanities coverage (who would have guessed this from a database called Web of Science??) so Google Scholar may provide more complete cited-by information. Neither one is 100% foolproof though.