Google Books – Exporting Citations

Google Books is becoming one of the most useful tools for researchers out there. Pair this with Google Scholar and, if you are lucky, network authentication from a university that has deals with the publishing companies and article databases and many of us can avoid the physical library entirely (especially if you include document delivery service and interlibrary loan). This is fantastic news for scholars living away from their university, namely distance education students and master’s/doctoral students finishing up their theses/dissertations (me, for instance).

Anyway, with more and more searches leading to Google Books I was going nuts trying to figure out how to export citations. I knew it had to be there. I don’t know why this was so difficult to figure out or why Google doesn’t directly have it on their page (not really geared toward scholars). Here is what I finally found (thanks New Mexico State University Library for the tip)

Once you find a book in Google Books this is what you do.

  1. On the left side, under the “Get this book” category, click on the second to last link, “Find in a library”
  2. Clicking on “Find a library” opens the book’s information page on World Cat.
  3. On the upper right, click on “Cite/Export”
  4. In the window that opens, you can choose to copy a citation (cool function) or export.
  5. Click on the export option that best works for you, “RefWorks” or “EndNote”

Of course, this doesn’t make the process grabbing citations for edited chapters, but I guess they can’t do all the work for us, can they?

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