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A quick way to get UW WorldCat to create your bibliography for you. This is a great alternative if you don’t have time to set up a RefWorks account, but you still need help figuring out how to cite your sources. | Time - 03:41 | Transcript

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Using WorldCat to Make Your Bibliography

[Image of UW Libraries homepage]

Audio: I’m going to show you a quick way to get the UW Libraries to create your bibliography for you, using the WorldCat search engine.

This is a great alternative if you don’t have time to set up a RefWorks account, but you still need help figuring out how to cite your sources.

[Image of amazon.com record for a book]

Audio: Ok, so I’m showing you the Amazon listing for this book, called Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy. Let’s say this is the book I’m using in my paper, but I have no idea how to cite it.

[Image of UW Libraries homepage]

Audio: We’ll go back to the UW Libraries website and put the title into the search box, then click “search” to find its record inside WorldCat.

[Image of UW WorldCat search results]

Audio: OK, it looks like Churchill’s Cold War, the book that I want, is the first book that’s come up, so I’ll click on that.

[Image of book record in WorldCat]

Audio: Now that I’m here looking for the record for this particular book, I’ll go up here wot where it says “cite” in tiny letters, and click on that.

[Image of pop-up window with citation information]

Audio: It will give me a pop-up window with my own choice of a citation for this book in whatever style I need. If I’m doing MLA, I can click to select that style and view the citation for my book in MLA style.

Or, if I decide I need APA style instead, I can click to get it. There it is, and I can select the text and then right-click to copy it to my clipboard.

Now that I’ve got that text on my clipboard, I can go ahead and paste it into a Word document or wherever I need it to create my bibliography.

Now if we go back to our search results.

[Image of search results page]

Audio: I also want to point out that this works for any book, article, or other material you find in WorldCat.

So what happens if we try it with an article instead of a book? Let me select this one to try it out.

[Image of record for article]

Audio: Right now we’re looking at the record just for this article, called “Blood, Sweat, and Fears.” Notice there is no picture associated with it because it is an article published in The New Republic – it’s not an entire book.

Let’s click on the tiny “cite” option again to get citation information for this item.

[Image of APA citation for article]

Audio: Great, so we’re looking at an APA style citation for this article.

One thing to note is that your citation may not be perfect – so for example, here, “BLOOD, SWEAT, AND FEARS” is all in capital letters – but in your actual bibliography, you may want to change it back to regular case. But all the other things about it, like the punctuation and other information, should be there in that citation for you.

[Image of UW Libraries homepage]

Audio: Remember, if you get stuck or have any questions, contact a UW Librarian by clicking on the “Ask Us” link on the UW Libraries homepage.