citation notes

NOTES ON USE AND CITATION OF SOURCES

With increasing availability of so many types of information and sources online, the rules for appropriate citation of sources may be less clear than in the old days of paper. Here are some guidelines regarding two important questions:
- WHEN do I need to cite sources?
- HOW do I cite sources?

I. WHEN to cite:

This is one of the most important questions in scholarly work. While there are some gray areas around the edges, the underlying principles are straightforward:

If your work incorporates ideas, claims, evidence, data, or interpretations that you've drawn from some other source, then you must cite that source.
If you use passages of prose from another source (including your own writing!), such quotes must be identified and the source acknowledged.
This includes words, images, 'facts' from websites even if they are in the public domain. You are free to use images (for example) from wikimedia -- but it is NOT appropriate to use them without acknowledging who created them and where you got them.

Failure to adhere to these principles appropriately can constitute plagiarism (taking credit for words or ideas not your own) -- the most serious scholarly sin. The thresholds for what must be cited can be ambiguous. For example, you do not need, generally, to cite a supporting reference for statements of 'common knowledge' (e.g., that the earth is round -- unless, say, you were analyzing the history of this understanding...). You do not need to cite a short, common phrase (like 'common knowledge') as a quotation, even though someone must have used it first. You must use your (informed) judgment. But, if you're unsure, ask -- or go ahead and cite source!

II. HOW to cite:

The basic principle here is straightforward. Your citation of a source should allow your reader to locate that source easily for themself. However, the particulars of format, what information should be provided, etc. are trickier than they used to be when cited work was almost always published on paper. SO, here are some guidelines.

FORMAT FOR REFERENCE: There are lots of varying standards here, even within the world of scholarly work. Some use footnotes, some use endnotes, some insert author and date in text with a 'references cited' section at the end, etc. I ask you to choose a standard and use it consistently. The easiest approach, if this is new to you, might be to look at a scholarly publication (we'll be reading a variety of them), and imitate its style.
INFORMATION TO INCLUDED IN A CITATION: As noted above, the main principle is that I should be able to locate the source being cited without trouble -- but the info you need to give to make that possible will vary, depending on nature of source:

If you're citing a formal publication -- a paper in scholarly journal, a book, an article in a generally available magazine -- it's usually appropriate and adequate to include:

author's name (always)
year of publication (always) and month/issue if available
title of the work (with volume and page numbers if part of a journal or larger work)
title of the including work (journal, magazine, book if it's an essay or chapter).
YOU SHOULD GIVE THIS INFO EVEN IF YOU READ THE WORK ON-LINE
HOWEVER, it is NOT necessary to give the date you accessed in online or the name of the online data-base through which you found it; in fact, these are irrelevant. for 'real' publications

Many published objects now acquire something called a 'Digital Object Identifier' or DOI. You should get in the habitat of citing this when available; eventually DOI alone will be adequate, but it's not yet considered so.
Less stable 'web-only' stuff can be trickier. You should attempt to include the same basic information -- an author (which might be an organization) name, a title, date of publicaton, publishing entity -- but these aren't always identifiable. What you MUST give are two things:

The URL ('Uniform Resource Locator' -- what appears in the address line of your browser). Note, again, that URL is NOT required for journals, books, even if you find them online, but you can use them IN ADDITION to the stuff listed above if it makes you happy.
For web-only stuff that is potentially 'fluid' (general websites, things can change, like wikipedia articles), then the DATE YOU ACCESSED THE INFORMATION, DOES become necessary (and your use of such information should recognize it's impermanence and ambiguity!)

A COUPLE OF ADDITIONAL THINGS:

A 'references cited' list is not necessarily the same as a 'bibliography'. The latter may include sources pertinent to your writing even if you don't make explicit and direct use of them. You MUST give full references for things you cite; a bibliography is an option (unless specifically requested).
It's fine to incorporate hyperlinks directly in digital papers produced for class, but this doesn't remove the obligation to provide explicit citation as discussed here.

Here are a few examples of full citations for different types of sources and in different formats -- all acceptable -- just to give you a sense:

Dockrill, S. J., and J. M. Bond. 2009. Sustainability and Resilience in Prehistoric North Atlantic Britain: The Importance of a Mixed Paleoeconomic System. Journal of the North Atlantic 2:33–50. doi: 10.3721/037.002.0105.

Crosby, A. W. Germs, Seeds & Animals: Studies in Ecological History. ME Sharpe Inc, 1994.

Wright, Karen. 1998. “Empires in the Dust.” Discover (March): 94–99.

1. Anon. Atlas of the Biosphere. 2010. Available at: http://www.sage.wisc.edu/atlas/index.php. Accessed September 18, 2010.

“Progressive Forest Clearing, Bolivia.” Text.Article, December 22, 2008. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36245.

III. Managing bibliographic and citation information.

While you don't have to do this to meet expectations listed above, I'd recommend that you think about getting and using one of the softwared tools available for managing your reference/bibliographic resources. I use a very powerful, easy-to-use, and FREE (open-source) reference management package called ZOTERO. Zotero is good at both 'capturing' reference information from on-line material and at generating in-text citations and references cited lists and bibliographies. You can also use it to store materials (including full pdf's of source) in the cloud and synchronize your database across machines.

-- KW, Feb 2017