Books vs. Articles
You may be surprised to learn that it’s not always easy to tell whether your source is a book. In an everyday sense, we know a book when we see it—it’s a bound, printed document that’s thicker and heavier than a magazine. But in a research context, there’s an important subcategory of book called an anthology. An anthology is a collection of articles by different authors; most anthologies list on the title page the name of an editor who selected the articles (some anthologies have multiple editors). Anthologies can be especially useful for researching a topic, because they often collect a range of approaches to the same issue, frequently by reprinting articles from scholarly journals. (See Scholarly vs. Popular Sources for more discussion of journals.) But when using an article from an anthology, it’s very important to list your entry by the author and title of the article, and not by the editor of the book. For more information, see Article in a Book.
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