Hey everybody this is Jeff again and we're going to talk today about how to
get an MLA citation
from JSTOR or how to put together an MLA citation from
JSTOR because it's not as easy as it is from EBSCO
so I run a search here in JSTOR
I've got a selection of articles I'm going to open up this first article here
and this takes some doing putting together citations from
JSTOR it's definitely not as easy as
from EBSCO so from JSTOR we've got this citation open now
click view citation and we can copy and paste this you just have to copy and
paste down to there
you don't need all the stuff here so I've got that highlighted
I'm going to copy that now just like in EBSCO I'm going to go into my word document
here I've got it works cited because we're talking about MLA
and I'm gonna paste this in
so there you go and then you can see there's a lot of problems with this
so we're gonna need to fix a lot of things first these authors are gonna
need to go
before the title so I'm gonna take that I'm gonna cut that
and I'm gonna paste that up here at the beginning
and to make matters worse here
I'll bring this title up to the top the authors' initials have
to come after the name
not before ok so B
is that initial there I'm gonna delete that
comma
K is this person's first initial so I'm going to go to the end here and do K.
period comma G.M.
Loper so we'll get rid of it there and go
and then we do a comma before the and and we're going to get rid of that and put J at the end here
so you kind of have to know what you're doing
when you work with JSTOR doing these citations okay
gonna hit Delete so we can get the title up here and
MLA the title of the article has to be in quotation marks
there's a period before the final quotation mark okay now I've got the title
set up
here is the journal that looks good
we'll just put a period at the end there that should be in italics and I'm going to take
off italics now to space there in bring the volume up now with the volume
we don't need Vol. there we just do 39
.4 for number four we don't need number
so that's how that is shown we don't need May in there
just put 2000 and
after that final parenthesis we do a
colon and we delete that comma and then we
delete that page thing there we just put the page numbers there
and there we go and another thing we have to show what database this came from
so we're going to do put this in italics
and
there's JSTOR we're gonna put a period at the end there take italics off
then we have to show this came from the web
and the date and today's date let me check and it has to go into this kind of a
format and this is the 11th of July
so I'm going to put in that format so there you go
that's how you do it I know that's a lot of steps basically you
unfortunately you really have to know MLA format for this so i would say
get an MLA book
or look at one of my cheat sheets online and you're going to have to put it together
you can copy and paste
and get most of the text but you're going to have to add some and you're certainly going to have to edit it
so now we've got all the text we need we're gonna have to put this in the
right format so click
on paragraph and
the indentations look good will set this to a hanging indent
and sometimes when I've worked with citations from
JSTOR for whatever reason it doesn't want to put it in hanging indent so
we'll see if it actually does it
click double space let's see if it does it
and the citations
from JSTOR do not wanna do this so I'm gonna
highlight this
I'm going to cheat this and see if I can make it go over there
I'm gonna grab just that line
okay so did you see what I had to do there for whatever reason and this is
something that may frustrate you
it certainly frustrates me for whatever reason when you set
what you normally do when you set something to a hanging indent
for some reason something about how it's coded or something when it comes from
JSTOR it ignores that hanging indent
that's really interesting so anyway what i did.
I grabbed I highlighted just this line to force it
into a hanging indent because it was ignoring all this and I then I went into paragraph
and I forced it into a half inch
margin there so it's a little ridiculous you have to do that
but that's the way that it goes
let's try another one and let's see
if it gives us that same problem let me take this back here
these are the kind of things you are going experience though I mean
we're into this crazy world here of databases
let's try another one here
how about I'm trying to find one that looks kinda standard
OK view the citation
this one they gave us the author's full name that's good
because they like to see that in MLA okay I'm gonna paste this in here
then we're going to get to work on this I wonder what would happen if I clicked keep text
only
well that's interesting isn't it well let's start doing our copying so keeping
text only hopefully it took out any of their ingrained formatting
maybe not okay so this is the person's last name we're going to put George back here
period going to get rid of that George in the front
I'm going to hit end here to go to the end K going to bring up cytology of bacteria
and the period's going to go there OK we got that in quotation marks going to do a space
botanical review botanical review should be
in italics
so I'm going to grab part of that or all of that got up here to the italics button
and there should be a period at the end there whoops
it's hard for me to tell spacing in italics there you go
take the italics off put a space there let's bring this up
don't need Vol. in there just 15
whoops 15.2
and let's see here
then we don't need February oh boy this article's going way back that's one thing
JSTOR specializes in is being able to archive
articles going way back we got that
gonna put the colon there take out that that's all we need for the page numbers
put a period at the end there we have to tell where we got it
so I'm going to do Ctrl I for italics JSTOR which is in all caps
period I'm going to take the italics off
and we're going to go Web whoops I didn't get my caps lock
Web and the date which is again
11 July 2011 now
*dldldldldldl* that was a drum roll let's see if we can put this into hanging
indent now
let's see if it will obey got double spaced and we're going to do hanging indent
OK this time it did it so I think
maybe the trick is when you paste it into your Word document hit that little button that says
keep text only to remove any of their formatting
so there's a couple of citations from JSTOR put into MLA
format and you can see it's not necessarily that easy
course the last thing we'd have to do there is put these two in alphabetical
order we can do that
highlight everything go up to the A-Z button
and it didn't *laugh*
it's not doing what I tell it to do today
you ever have one of those oh wait because it's set by date not text
okay I just have to double check things here was set by date: okay double check that
whew okay it did one thing I asked it that's good so
there's a couple examples of how you put citations from JSTOR
into MLA format and
just be careful because it's a rascally database and it doesn't
really give you too much formatting and then it tries to resist your changes
when you do it
so my thing my hints would be when you paste it remove any formatting that it has on it
and go from there that's all for now
as always contact me if you have any questions and look online
at the library website for the online cheat sheets for how to do MLA as
well that should help too
okay until next time this is Jeff signing off