Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Reference resources

This page is intended to collect together various websites, books and journals which can provide good referencing for mathematics articles.

Websites with extensive coverage of mathematical topics

Many valuable references in mathematics are beginning to migrate from inaccessible libraries to scans available on the web. This includes both classical publications and recent ones. The most common formats are:

HTML or otherwise suitable for web browsing
PDF for reading with Adobe Acrobat
PS for printing
DjVu for scanned documents
DVI as produced by TeX

Scans of historical works are significantly more compact in DjVu as compared to PDF, and often the text can be searched. Readers for this popular format can be downloaded and used at no cost. Adobe's PS (and PDF) format can be imaged for viewing using a Ghostscript implementation (with Ghostview), which also can be downloaded and used freely. On Linux systems, the Evince viewer can handle DVI as well as other formats, and DVI viewers are also available freely available from LizardTech for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS systems.

General reference

General books online

Historical mathematics

Other mathematics

Online Journals with free public access

arXiv has many articles that have been published in journals. Additionally, overlay journals include the Annals of Mathematics, Geometry and Topology. front for the math arXiv

Citation templates

{{SpringerEOM}} — Springer Encyclopaedia of Mathematics
{{MathGenealogy}} — Mathematics Genealogy Project
{{Cite arXiv}} and {{Arxiv}} — arXiv
{{MacTutor Biography}} — MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
{{MathWorld}}, {{WolframFunctionsSite}} — MathWorld
{{Planetmath reference}}, {{PlanetMath}} — PlanetMath
{{OEIS}} — reference to sequence in the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
Category:Citation templates (see especially Wikipedia:Citation templates)

There are also a couple of convenient tools which produce formatted citations for books ({{cite book}}) and web pages ({{cite web}}) given the ISBN (see below) or URL:

The latter, which only works for ISBNs, is slow and produces code which always needs tweaking, but is useful as a backup.

Document identifiers

ISBN

An ISBN makes a reference to a book unambiguous, and can help readers to locate a reference. Suppose, for example, you want to cite a book by Hartman entitled Ordinary Differential Equations. If you use Google to search for [Hartman "Ordinary Differential Equations" ISBN] (note the quotes around the title and the explicit request for the search term ISBN), you quickly discover that the second edition, reissued in soft cover in 2002, has ISBN 0898715105. This handy online tool will convert an ISBN-10 into a correctly hyphenated ISBN-13, for this example ISBN 978-0-89871-510-1.

One caution is that a book will have a different ISBN for hard, soft, reprints by different publishers, and different editions. Sometimes it is acceptable, even a good idea, to list the most recent edition (and soft if available), but sometimes not. For example, material covered in an older edition may be dropped in a newer one; and page numbers and other location information may change. Consider what one Amazon.com reviewer of Mac Lane and Birkhoff's Algebra, 3/e, ISBN 978-0-8218-1646-2, says about this book in three editions: "[I]t also contained unusual topics such as multilinear algebra and affine and projective spaces, but no Galois theory. The second edition has gained a chapter on Galois theory, but has lost the part on affine and projective spaces. The third edition is the best! It has recovered the part which was lost in the second edition, and had its exposition considerably polished." Going back to the Hartman example, this means that if the article refers to, say, Chapter VII: The Poincaré-Bendixson Theory, of

Hartman, Philip (1964), Ordinary Differential Equations, Wiley

then it may be a mistake to change the citation to

Hartman, Philip (2002), Ordinary Differential Equations (2nd ed.), SIAM, ISBN 978-0-89871-510-1

which is an unabridged but corrected (soft) reprint of the (hard) second edition

Hartman, Philip (1982), Ordinary Differential Equations (2nd ed.), Birkhäuser, ISBN 978-0-8176-3068-3

The only way to be sure is to see what the article depends on and compare both texts.

Verify references

Finding potential sources for references can usually be done by a simple Google search, as described above, or if you only wish to consider academic sources, Google scholar. Only cite a (reliable) source after you have verified that the source actually supports the statements in the article. Although not optimally convenient, Google book search allows you to search book texts, and can sometimes be used for such verification if no online version or library copy is available. Also Amazon.com allows reading fragments of some books online.