Citing Articles from Electronic Journals and Online Databases

Electronic Journals

Often the exact URL for an article will be difficult to find or too long to cite. If your article is not displayed in a frame (or subset of the browser screen), look at the address displayed in your browser's location bar. You will want to find the root URL (i.e. the section after the http:// through the next /).

Example:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/Journals/member/institutions/processpaid.asp?contentid=nhs.1999.5&filetype=pdf&article=54744&year=&journal=
is the URL for an individual article in the journal Nursing and Health Sciences. Very messy. You may put just the first section of the address in your citation: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/

The full citation for this article would look like this:

Burnard, Philip (1999). Carl Rogers and postmodernism: Challenges in nursing and health sciences. Nursing and Health Sciences, 1, 241-247. Retrieved January 22, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com

If your article is displayed within a browser frame, the address in the location box will not be correct for the article. You will need to take one of the following actions:
If you are using Netscape, you can right click on the article's frame and choose "Open Frame in New Window".
If you are using Internet Explorer, you will need to return to the Libraries' home page and search for your article by choosing "Electronic Journals", then find the journal title using the alphabetical listing.

Online Databases

Producers of online databases containing journal articles are moving toward providing persistent URL's (or PURLS) so that linking to specific articles over time can be accomplished. However, the databases that we are demonstrating today, that contain the nursing specific materials you need, do not have PURLS.

In order to help the reader of your references to locate the article you have cited, use the following in your references for the URL:

http://www.library.unr.edu/online/databases.html

By providing a link to the University Libraries' databases page, the reader of your research will be able to again find the article you cited.

University of Nevada, Reno Libraries