Older articles found online frequently do not have adequate information that is required for a complete citation or reference. How do I get past this?
I hope that older articles may have Year of publication, Volume number, Issue number and Page number. Those four details are sufficient for making a citation. Of course, older articles does not have digital object identifier (DOI) to link the references online.
Presently, leading journals do not prefer to cite articles older than two decades. They expect maximum citation from the last five years. If many older citations are referenced, it means that the research topic is an outdated one.
You should be able to verify the details by going to a library search engine. For a psychology publication I would go to PsycInfo, or Medline. If it's a book, check if there is a reference in online Library of Congress Catalog or the World Catalog of Books.
A practical way is to search the paper in Google Scholar and click on the "cite" link.
You can also use a reference software like "EndNote" and manually enter the details of the reference, than select the template you need to automatically format the citation.
Although many editors and referee consider older articles outdated and consequently their field of research outdated if no newer article are available this is a major bias in research.
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