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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by GabrielF (talk | contribs) at 05:15, 4 May 2011 (added Category:WikiProject reference libraries using HotCat). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This page collects helpful resources — Web sites, books, journals, and so on — to assist in writing good mathematics articles. To follow the scientific citation guidelines adopted by WikiProject Mathematics, every article should cite high quality sources where readers can learn more about the topic. In the spirit of Wikipedia, most sources listed here can be freely viewed and downloaded without charge and without access restrictions, thus they are particularly convenient for both editors and readers alike. As well, some tools are listed to help find and format citation data.

Source formats and viewing options

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 document formats are:

  1. HTML: Hypertext markup language, the standard web browsing format
  2. PDF: Portable document format, the Adobe Acrobat format
  3. PS: PostScript, Adobe's format for printing
  4. DjVu: a compact format for scanned documents
  5. DVI: Device independent format, 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.

Websites with extensive coverage of mathematical topics

General reference

  • Bartleby.com: Great Books Online — This resources provides access to Columbia encyclopedia, as well as the Columbia Gazetteer. The other books that are offered are more useful for literature articles
  • Encyclopaedia Brittanica 11/e — This is full 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. Its copyright has expired and its content is open to anyone.
  • Perseus Digital Library — This is an electronic library of source materials maintained by Tufts.
  • Mathematical Quotation Server — This is a resource of Mathematics related quotations. It is maintained by Furman and is available for download.
  • l o Q t u s — This is a non-specific quotation database.
  • faqs.org — A database of Internet related FAQs

General books online

Historical mathematics

Other mathematics

Online journals and preprints

Online journals with free public access

Non-free online journal archive

  • JSTOR — A very useful resource, requires subscription. Most universities provide access through their network

Citation templates

Further information: Category:Mathematics referencing resources and Category:Mathematics source templates
  • {{AS ref}} — Abramowitz and Stegun
  • {{dlmf}} — Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
  • {{Springer}} — Springer Encyclopaedia of Mathematics
  • {{MathGenealogy}} — Mathematics Genealogy Project
  • {{MathSciNet}} — MathSciNet (A.M.S. Mathematical Reviews)
  • {{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
  • {{Zbl}} - Makes a link to Zentralblatt MATH from a Zbl id.
  • {{JFM}} - Makes a link to Zentralblatt MATH from a JFM (Template:Lang-de) id.
  • {{harvtxt}}, {{harv}}, {{harvs}}, and {{harvnb}}, in combination with {{citation}} — Harvard referencing, that can be used as an alternative to the "footnote style". For example, take the text reference {{harvtxt|Pincherle|1880}} and the citation {{citation|last = Pincherle |first = Salvatore |title = Saggio di una introduzione alla teorica delle funzioni analitiche secondo i principi del prof. Weierstrass |journal = Giornale di Matematiche |year = 1880}}. This produces the reference Pincherle (1880) for inline citation, and the full bibliographic reference Pincherle, Salvatore (1880), "Saggio di una introduzione alla teorica delle funzioni analitiche secondo i principi del prof. Weierstrass", Giornale di Matematiche. The inline reference is an HTML link, linking to an anchor embedded in the second, full bibliographic reference.
  • Category:Citation templates (see especially Wikipedia:Citation templates)

Citation tools

There are also some convenient tools to find data and produce formatted citations:

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

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

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

Verifing references

Finding potential sources for references can often 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.

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