USGS Home
Contact USGS
Search USGS

How to get Citation_Information for USGS publications

1. Find the identifier for the publication in the USGS Publications Warehouse. There are two ways to get this identifier:
   1. Guess. The general form is serYYYYNNNN, where
      ser is an abbreviation of the publication series,
      YYYY is the two- or four-digit year of publication, and
      NNNN is the report number within the series, without leading zeros.
      Series abbreviations include

      ofr	Open-File Report
      b	Bulletin
      pp	Professional Paper
      ds	Data Series
      sir	Scientific Investigations Report
      sim	Scientific Investigations Map
      i	I-map, various series names
      mf	MF-map, various series names
      cir	Circular
      fs	Fact Sheet

      You can test your guess by typing this URL into your web browser, replacing (pwid) with your guess at the pub's correct identifier: http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/(pwid)
   2. Search the publications warehouse to find the citation page of the publication you want. The identifier is the last part of that page's URL. For example, searching USGS Publications Warehouse for "Porphyry Copper deposits of the world" will yield a record for Open-File Report 2008-1155; in the upper right corner of the Publication Citation, there is a link labeled "Bookmark this citation"; it ends with the identifier ofr20081155.
2. Copy the identifier into the Citation_Information form and click Submit [Show] [Hide]
   
3. Highlight the citation information in the form, press Ctrl-C or choose Copy from the Edit menu [Show] [Hide]
   
4. Open Tkme and highlight a Citation element such as Source_Citation [Show] [Hide]
   
5. Right-click to get a context menu and choose Paste [Show] [Hide]
   
6. The citation information is inserted into the metadata [Show] [Hide]