| ABSTRACT | a short summary of an article or book; abstracts are provided along with citation information in many periodical indexes, and may be written by either the paper's author or an indexer. |
| ADOBE ACROBAT READER | a program for viewing PDF files, used in many full-text electronic journals. The reader program is free, and if you do not have it on your machine when it is needed to access an article, instructions for downloading it will usually appear on your screen. |
| ALMANAC | a volume containing a collection of miscellaneous facts and statistics on many subjects. Example: The World Almanac and Book of Facts. |
| ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY | a list of books, articles, or other documents on a topic or by a particular author containing a citation of each item, as well as a brief description and/or a critical evaluation of it. |
| APA STYLE | a set of rules and guidelines for citing references as well as preparing and submitting manuscripts for publication from the American Psychological Association. These rules are detailed in the Publication Manual of the APA (the most recent version is available in the reference collection.) |
| ARTICLE | an essay or research report on a subject. Articles appear in magazines, journals, newspapers and other sources such as encyclopedias. |
| ASCII | American Standard Code for Information Interchange - basically a document in plain text, without any formatting codes such as those used in word-processing programs. |
| BIBLIOGRAPHIC CITATION | (synonym for bibliographic reference) identifying information about a publication, used in catalogs and indexes as well as in lists of 'literature cited' or 'references' in scholarly publications. Formats vary, but a book citation generally includes at least information on the author, title, publisher, and date of publication; an article citation includes author, title, date, and information on the periodical in which it was published. |
| BIBLIOGRAPHY | a compilation of citations of works by a given author or works on a particular subject. |
| BLURB | a brief summary or description of a work printed on the book jacket, publisher's catalog or advertisement to entice potential purchasers. |