Tracking Down a Source

If you do much research, you’ll soon find that the most frustrating thing that can happen is realizing that you’ve forgotten to write down the citation for a vital piece of information. You end up with an absolutely perfect quote or a fundamental fact that you can’t use—because you don’t know where you found it.

A few years ago, you’d be stuck if this happened. Today, you just might get lucky with the help of the Internet. There is one trick that just might work.

If you have an unidentified quote lying around and you know that it came from an article, book, magazine, or newspaper, you can often track down its source by surrounding it with quotation marks and putting it into a search engine.

The quotation marks will ensure that the search engine will only look for the entire, intact string of words. Chances are, your source has been posted online in an archive or on a site that publishes etexts.

Want to test this method? Try plugging this quote into a search engine. Don't forget the quotation marks! You will come up with the source of the words:

"You are mad, said Mr. Snodgrass."