How to check citations from newspapers over the Internet
October 22, 2018 10:23 PM   Subscribe

I am publishing a nonfiction book, and the citations need to be checked. I know that many newspapers have online archives, but are there other ways to check citations via the Internet?

I'm publishing a nonfiction book about 20th century political history. The footnotes were translated from the French edition of this book. It's become clear that they are not very accurate, and they all need to be checked. We only need the citation information, and not the entire article.

We checked all of the books cited in Worldcat, so those are taken care of. But there are a number of newspapers and magazines cited as well. The citations are from the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and they are from both English language sources and Russian language sources.

Many of the English-language sources are from newspapers that have online archives, so we can check those. But not all newspapers have those online archives, or they don't go back far enough for us.

I think some of our sources will have to be checked in an academic library, but I'm hoping we can do as many online as possible. Are there any other resources for checking the citations other than the archives of each individual newspaper?

Thanks very much for any help.
posted by Surprised By Bees to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Public libraries sometimes have subscriptions to online newspaper archives.
posted by oceano at 11:12 PM on October 22, 2018


As with so many Google projects the Google News archive is a shadow of its former self but sometimes you can get lucky. For anything in Australia (and note that one story can be syndicated and show up in overseas papers, so search by title or any quote you have) the National Library of Australia's Trove web site seems thorough... I don't really know though as I'm not Australian.
posted by XMLicious at 12:27 AM on October 23, 2018


For any British publications, the British Newspaper Archive.
posted by penguin pie at 3:15 AM on October 23, 2018


Ah - just noticed you said they're seventies, eighties and nineties, and that link suggests the archive runs up to the fifties, which surprises me a little. Why don't you drop an email to the British Library reference team, on the address at the bottom of this page and see what they advise?
posted by penguin pie at 3:19 AM on October 23, 2018


My local library's online portal includes a subscription to NewsBank, which has newspapers across America going back to the 1800s up through to today.
posted by AppleTurnover at 10:04 AM on October 23, 2018


Best answer: If you just need citations and not the full text of the article, you may be able to use an academic library website. Most research libraries will have some kind of discovery search tool on the home page that does a metasearch of the library's databases with requiring you to log in.

If you get stuck on the Russian-language articles, here's a page from UC Irvine with some likely looking open-access indexes.
posted by toastedcheese at 1:07 PM on October 23, 2018


Response by poster: Good idea about checking an academic library website. This, for example, looks very helpful to us:
https://ucla.worldcat.org/

Unfortunately all of those Russian language resources don't cover what we need; it's mostly newspapers.

I will try the public library as well.
posted by Surprised By Bees at 9:22 PM on October 23, 2018


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