Sources

   When I first started working on this site, I wasn't very big into citation; I was fresh out of high school, and most of the sources I was using for this site were secondary or tertiary sources (the old "Dinosaur Dictionary" types) that didn't do a lot of citing either.  It turns out that citing sources is very important.  Although this site follows in the grand tradition of secondary or tertiary summation of information from all over the place, I think you, the readers, should see from where I get the vast majority of my information.  So, without further ado...

Books/Articles in Books:
    The Internet is a lovely place, but for scholarly information, it's a pale substitute to books and articles in scholarly publications if you want the real deal.  For one thing, papers and articles in scholarly books are (ideally) subjected to peer review, while your average website is not.  

In alphabetical order, these are the books which I come back to the most:
    Bakker, Robert, 1986. The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction. New York: William Morrow and Company.
    Benton, Michael J., Mikhail A. Shishkin, David M. Unwin, and Evgenii N. Kurochkin, 2003 edition, eds. The Age of Dinosaurs in Russia and Mongolia.  Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
    Carpenter, Kenneth, 2001, ed. The Armored Dinosaurs.  Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
    -2006, ed. Horns and Beaks.
    Carpenter, Kenneth, and Philip J. Currie, 1990, eds. Dinosaur Systematics.  Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
    Currie, Phillip J., and Eva B. Koppelhus, 2005, eds. Dinosaur Provincial Park: A Spectacular Ancient Ecosystem Revealed.  Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
    Curry Rogers, Kristina K., and Jeffrey A. Wilson, 2005, eds. The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.
    Dodson, Peter, 1996. The Horned Dinosaurs. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
    Farlow, James O., and Michael K. Brett-Surman, 1997, eds. The Complete Dinosaur. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
    Foster, John R., 2003. Paleoecological Analysis of the Vertebrate Fauna of the Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic), Rocky Mountain Region, U.S.A. Albuquerque, New Mexico: New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.  Bulletin 23.
    Gillette, David D., 1999, ed. Vertebrate Paleontology in Utah. Salt Lake City, Utah: Utah Geological Survey.
    Glut, Donald F, 1997. Dinosaurs: The Encyclopedia. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.
     -Supplement 1, 2000.
     -Supplement 2, 2002.
     -Supplement 3, 2003.
     -Supplement 4, 2006.
     -Supplement 5, 2008.
    Lucas, Spencer G., James I. Kirkland, and John W. Estep, 1998, eds. Lower and Middle Cretaceous Terrestrial Ecosystems. Albuquerque, New Mexico: New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.  Bulletin 14.
    Lull, Richard S., and Nelda E. Wright, 1942. Hadrosaurian Dinosaurs of North America. Geological Society of America Special Paper 40: 1-242.
    Martill, David M., and Darren Naish, 2001, eds. Dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight. London: Palaeontological Association.
    Norman, David B., 1985. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs: An Original and Compelling Insight into Life in the Dinosaur Kingdom. New York: Crescent Books (Crown Publishers, Inc.).
    Paul, Gregory S., 1988. Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. New York: Simon and Schuster.   
    Paul, Gregory S., 2000, ed. The Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs. New York: St. Martin's Press.
    Tanke, Darren H., and Kenneth Carpenter, 2001, eds. Mesozoic Vertebrate Life. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
    Weishampel, David B., Peter Dodson, and Halszka Osmólska, 1992 edition, eds. The Dinosauria. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
     -Second Edition, 2004.           

New Releases: 
More from Ken Carpenter's series of large works dedicated to specific groups:
    Theropods ("Carnivorous Dinosaurs") 
    Sauropods ("Thunder-Lizards") 
    Non-thyreophoran ornithischians ("Horns and Beaks" - also the title of a short story I wrote back in 2001, so maybe I should press charges?)
The second edition of Fastovsky and Weishampel's Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs

Other upcoming releases: 
Books from the dueling tyrannosaurid symposia of 2005 (100 years of T. rex, after all; I'll see if I can get a few pizzas and a classroom for a couple of hours on 100 years of Thescelosaurus in May 2013);
Multiple bulletins from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, some of which are out now, some of which are out but not on the website, and some of which are in press.

Internet Sources and Contacts:
    The majority of the Internet sites out there are like mine, second or thirdhand summations of information, so I don't rely on them as much as I once did.  There are some exceptions, though:
    The sites on my links page are good places to cross-reference.  Each presents different information and has its own particular strengths.  A major standout is the DINOSAUR Mailing List Archives; I am a (quiet) member, and get most of my information on new taxa, research, articles, and books from postings to the List.  George "Dinogeorge" Olshevsky's Dinosaur Genera List updates and Mickey Mortimer's Details On... postings have been particularly informative, but I by no means limit myself to just these.
    In addition, I've had contact with some of the people from the DML who've provided information and ideas to improve the site.  Mickey Mortimer of The Theropod Database, Toby White of Vertebrate Notes (now with Palaeos), T. Mike Keesey of the Dinosauricon, Steve Brusatte of The Official Dino Land Website, and Brad McFeeters of MESOZOIC DINOSAURS have been especially helpful in this regard.  Finally, some of the readers of this site have pointed out omissions and drawn my attention to certain areas. 

    My policy on what to include and what not to include has changed over the years.  At the beginning, I used to bring in random DML chatter, but as I've gotten more experienced, I've cut that out.  Information from peer-reviewed papers and edited volumes (think Ken Carpenter's recent series of books) is always useable.  Printed abstracts, such as SVP abstracts, are fair game, as they are published, but are often not as good because they are not reviewed and a lot can change between abstract submission, presentation, and publication (I had that experience myself with my poster at the Mesa 2005 SVP, and another prime example, for those of you who were at Mesa, was Peter Galton's talk on Thecodontosaurus, which came to notably different conclusions from the abstract).  Talks and posters themselves are not fair game, because they are unpublished.  This is a social nicety of the science; posters and talks are works in progress; important information may be withheld; there is the possibility of being scooped; and sometimes publication in certain journals requires that other people hold off on talking about the work until publication.  Abstracts are fair because the workers themselves have decided what can be said and disseminated for all time, and if anyone should know what can be said, it is the workers themselves.  Random personal chatter is not useable.  The DML is a grey zone, because it is a strange sort of instant electronic publication, and there have been problems in the past about people talking about things that they shouldn't have been spreading to the world.  Theses are not fair game, and neither are accidental typos and leftovers in online museum collection catalogues (there are a fair number of museum names out there, and often they turn out to be a rejected name for something already published).  The most useful ways I've found of getting new information have been checking the DML for new papers, and reading Glut's encyclopedia supplements; somehow he manages to find every dinosaur-related publication in the world, not just those that name new dinosaurs. 

If you ever want to know where I got some bit of information, don't hesitate to ask!