- Any premade citation (from websites, from citation tools, from the databases, or anywhere else) are not guaranteed to be perfect. They're put together by computer algorithms, which can only be as good as the data that's available to them.
- Most of the database citations are pretty good, and it's a tool that's available for you to use. A correct citation will generally look correct, so it's not cheating to copy.
- However, if you don't understand what you're seeing, you won't be able to tell if it's correct or not (and some errors are very revealing in addition to being very wrong).
EBSCO's citations tend to be more accurate than not (as of this writing, at least!). When you click into an article, either the Detailed Record or full text views, there's an icon in the toolbar on the right to open up the citations panel.
You may have to scroll through the citations to find what you're looking for.
Common Errors:
- [Very common] If you see an author and/or article title in ALL CAPS, you do need to rewrite them to be Standard Headline Capitalization. Only acronyms should remain in all-uppercase.
- You might need to paste the citation into your document by right-clicking and choose the "merge formatting" option to ensure other colors or fonts don't carry over.
- [Less common] Page numbers sometimes will only show the first page number rather than a range. Double-check -- if your article spans more than one page, you need to add the final page number to the citation.