LibAnswers: Referencing

Many research papers are now available online through institutional repositories for open access research (such as DORA at DMU).  These are often referred to as 'Post Prints' as they are the author's copy of the article after it’s been reviewed and corrected, but before the publisher has formatted it for publication.  

In these cases, reference the article in the same way that you would reference a print journal. If the article is only available online and not in any print form, include the URL (or DOI).

If the article is a prepublication (meaning that the article has not yet been peer-reviewed or formatted by the publishers, so is essentially like a draft version), you should make it clear in the reference that this is a preprint and not the final approved article.

The format for a preprint would be as follows:

Author (Year) ‘Title of article’. To be published in Title of the journal [preprint]. Available at: URL (Accessed: date).

If a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is available you can use this instead of the URL.

Example

Jeon, I., Lee, K. and Park, J.-H. (2018) 'Ramond-Ramond cohomology and O(D,D) T-duality'. To be published in Journal of High Energy Physics [Preprint]. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3478 (Accessed: 24 August 2018).

In this example, the preprint article has been uploaded to the Arxiv open access repository.