15.1 Reasons for Citing Your Sources
15.2 The Requirements of Citation
15.2.1 Situations Requiring Citations
Your first duty as a researcher is to get the facts right. Your second duty is to tell readers where the facts came from. To that end, you must cite the sources of the facts, ideas, or words that you use in your paper.
There at least four reasons to cite your sources:
1. To give credit. Research is hard work. Some who do it well receive concrete rewards—money, promotions, good grades, degrees, and so on. But no less important is recognition, the pride and prestige of seeing one’s name associated with knowledge that others value and use. In fact, for some researchers that is the only reward. So when you cite the work of another, you give that writer the recognition he or she has earned.
2. To assure readers about the accuracy of your facts. Researchers cite sources to be fair to other researchers but also to earn their readers’ trust. It is not enough to get the facts right. You must also tell readers the source of the facts so that they can judge their reliability, even check them if they wish. Readers do not trust a source they do not know and cannot find. If they do not trust your sources, they will not trust your facts; and if they do not trust your facts, they will not trust your argument. You establish the first link in that chain of trust by citing your sources fully, accurately, and appropriately.
3. To show readers the research tradition that informs your work. Researchers cite sources whose data they use, but they also cite work that they extend, support, contradict, or correct. These citations help readers not only understand your specific project but connect it to other research in your field.
4. To help readers follow or extend your research. Many readers use sources cited in a research paper not to check its reliability but to pursue their own work. So your citations help others not only to follow your footsteps but to strike out in new directions.
You must never appear to take credit for work that is not your own (see 7.9), and proper citation guards against the charge of plagiarism. But it also strengthens your argument and assists others who want to build on your work.
To fulfill the requirements of citation, you need to know when to include a source citation in your paper and what information about the source to include.
Chapter 7, particularly 7.9, discusses in depth when you should cite materials from other sources. Briefly, you should always provide a citation in the following situations:
■ when you quote exact words from a source (see also chapter 25 on quotations)
■ when you paraphrase ideas that are associated with a specific source, even if you don’t quote exact words from it
■ when you use any idea, data, or method attributable to any source you consulted
As noted in 15.1, you may also use citations to point readers to sources that are relevant to a particular portion of your argument but not quoted or paraphrased. Such citations demonstrate that you are familiar with these sources, even if they present claims at odds with your own.
Over the long tradition of citing sources, as researchers in different fields began to write in different ways, they also developed distinctive ways of citing and documenting their sources. When citation methods became standardized, researchers had to choose from not just one or two standards but many.
Citation styles differ in the elements included and in the format of these elements, but they have the same aim: to give readers the information they need to identify and find a source. For most sources, including books, articles, unpublished documents, and other written material, in print or electronic form, that information must answer these questions:
■ Who wrote, edited, or translated the text (sometimes all three)?
■ What data identify the text? This includes the title and subtitle of the work; title of the journal, collection, or series it appears in, as well as volume number, edition number, or other identifying information; and page numbers or other locating information if the reference is to a specific part of a larger text.
■ Who published the text and when? This includes the name of the publisher and the place and date of publication—or an indication that the document has not been published.
■ Where can the text be found? Most printed sources can be found in a library or bookstore, information that goes without saying. For a source obtained online, a URL or the name of a commercial database will help readers find it. For an item from a one-of-a-kind collection, data will include the place where the collection is housed.
Details vary for other sources, such as sound and video recordings, but they answer the same four questions: Who wrote, edited, translated, or was otherwise responsible for creating the source? What data identify it? Who published it and when? Where can it be found?
Your readers will expect you to use the citation style appropriate to their particular field, not just because they are familiar with this style but because when you use it, you show them that you understand their values and practices. The details may seem trivial: when to use capitals, periods, commas, and even where to put a space. But if you do not get these small matters right, many of your readers will question whether they can trust you on the bigger ones. Few researchers try to memorize all these details. Instead, they learn the forms of the citations they use most so that they do not need to look them up repeatedly. Then, for citing sources that are less common or have unusual elements, they consult a book like this one.
This book covers the two most common citation forms: notes-bibliography style, or simply bibliography style (used widely in the humanities and in some social sciences), and author-date style (used in most social sciences and in the natural and physical sciences, and referred to in the previous edition of this book as parenthetical citations–reference list style). If you are not certain which style to use in a paper, consult your instructor.
You may be asked to use different styles in different settings (for example, an art history course and a political science course). Within a specific paper, however, always follow a single style consistently.
If you are new to research, read this section for a brief description of how the two citation styles work. Then, if you are using bibliography style, read chapter 16 for an overview of this style, and refer to chapter 17 for detailed guidelines and examples for citing most types of sources you’re likely to consult. If you are using author-date style, the overview and detailed guidelines are in chapters 18 and 19, respectively.
In bibliography-style citations, you signal that you have used a source by placing a superscript number at the end of the sentence in which you refer to it:
He concludes that “being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith.”1
You then cite the source of that quotation in a correspondingly numbered note that provides information about the source (author, title, and facts of publication) plus relevant page numbers. Notes are printed at the bottom of the page (called footnotes) or in a list collected at the end of your paper or the end of each chapter (called endnotes). All notes have the same general form:
N: 1. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 5.
If you cite the same text again, you can shorten subsequent notes:
N: 5. Lanier, Not a Gadget, 133–34.
In most cases, you also list sources at the end of the paper in a bibliography. That list normally includes every source you cited in a note and sometimes others you consulted but did not cite. Each bibliography entry includes the same information contained in a full note, but in a slightly different form:
B: Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
In author-date citations, you signal that you have used a source by placing a parenthetical citation (including author, date, and relevant page numbers) next to your reference to it:
He concludes that “being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith” (Lanier 2010, 5).
At the end of the paper, you list all sources in a reference list. That list normally includes every source you cited in a parenthetical citation and sometimes others you consulted but did not cite. Each reference list entry includes complete bibliographical information for a source. The publication date immediately follows the name of the author, making it easy to follow a parenthetical citation to its corresponding entry in the reference list:
R: Lanier, Jaron. 2010. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
The standard citation forms evolved in the age of print, but researchers now increasingly rely on sources that are found online or in another electronic medium. These sources have been used long enough for researchers to have created standard citation forms adapted to their special characteristics.
15.4.1.1 INFORMATION IN CITATIONS. When you cite online sources, you include many of the same pieces of information as you would for print sources, but sometimes this information is difficult to find, unavailable, or subject to change without notice. These factors can make it more difficult for your readers to find the sources you’ve cited, and in some cases they may make you question the authority and reliability of a source.
■ Many websites have no identifiable author, publisher, or sponsor. This makes them the equivalent of any other anonymous source, unlikely to be authoritative or reliable enough to use without serious qualification (see 3.4.3). The same caution applies to content such as user comments that are posted under pseudonyms, even if the website or blog they are posted on is considered a reliable source.
■ Online content can be revised without notice, and there are no standards for indicating revisions. A revision date on one website may indicate correction of a spelling error while on another it may mark changes in factual data or claims.
■ Online content may be simultaneously available from more than one site, some more reliable than others.
■ Most online sources are located through a URL (uniform resource locator), but URLs come and go. You cannot always be certain they will be available months, weeks, or even days later, and their disappearance would make it difficult or impossible for you or your readers to find the content you originally consulted.
In your research, choose online sources carefully. When information is available on multiple websites or in multiple media (print and online), consult the most reliable version available, and always cite the version you consulted.
15.4.1.2 TWO CATEGORIES OF SOURCES. Online sources fall into two categories.
1. Many online sources are like print sources in everything except medium—for example, an article published in an online journal instead of in a printed journal. Other sources of this type include online books, newspaper and magazine articles, and public documents. Cite an online source of this type similarly to a print source, beginning with standard facts of publication (author’s name, title, date, and so forth). At the end of the citation, add the date you accessed the material and the URL (see 15.4.1.3) or the name of the database through which you accessed the source (see 15.4.1.4). You can find examples of how to cite such items under the relevant type of source in chapter 17 (for bibliography style) and chapter 19 (for author-date style).
2. Other types of online sources, such as institutional or personal websites and social networking services, are unique to the medium. Unlike more traditional media, these sources often lack one or more of the standard facts of publication. To cite such a source, you will need to give as much information as possible about it in addition to a URL and access date (see 15.4.1.3). Examples of how to cite these items appear in 17.7 (for bibliography style) and 19.7 (for author-date style).
15.4.1.3 URLS AND ACCESS DATES. For any source you cite, you must always include the full facts of publication in addition to a URL. If the URL changes, interested readers will often be able to find your source by searching for the author, title, and other facts of publication.
Capitalize the components of a URL exactly as they appear on your screen. If the URL ends in a slash, include it. Do not enclose the URL in brackets. It is best not to break a URL at the end of a line, but if you need to do so, see 20.4.2 for some guidelines.
If a website gives a preferred form of the URL along with the citation data for a source, use that rather than the URL in your browser’s address bar. Some sources are identified by a DOI (digital object identifier). URLs based on DOIs are more persistent and stable than ordinary URLs. To cite a source that includes a DOI, append the DOI to http://dx.doi.org/ in your citation. For examples, see the sections on journal articles in figure 16.1 (for bibliography style) or figure 18.1 (for author-date style) and in chapters 17 and 19.
In addition, every citation of an online source should include the date you last accessed it. If the source is revised or deleted, readers (and your instructor) will want to know when the source was last available to you. Chapters 17 and 19 provide many examples of access dates in citations.
15.4.1.4 COMMERCIAL DATABASES. Many online sources, including journals and other periodicals and some electronic books, are accessible only through a commercial database with restricted access (often through a university or other major library). If such a database lists a recommended URL along with the source, use that one instead of the one in your address bar. A URL based on a DOI, if available, is the best option (see 15.4.1.3). If no suitably short and direct URL exists, however, you may substitute the name of the database for the URL (e.g., LexisNexis Academic). For examples, see 17.1.10 (bibliography style) and 19.1.10 (author-date style).
Publications available in other electronic media, such as an electronic book available for download or as a CD- or DVD-ROM, can often be cited similarly to printed books, with the addition of information about the medium or file format; see 17.1.10 and 17.5.8 (for bibliography style) or 19.1.10 and 19.5.8 (for author-date style).
If a source is available in more than one electronic medium (for example, in more than one electronic book format), or both electronically and in print form, consult the most reliable and authoritative version (see 3.4), and always cite the version you consulted.
You can ease the process of preparing and checking citations if you anticipate what you will need.
■ Use the most authoritative sources, in their most reliable version. If you find second- or thirdhand information, track down the original source.
■ If a source is available in multiple versions, always cite the one you actually consulted. There may be small but important differences between the versions that could affect the accuracy of your quotations or other references to the source.
■ Record all bibliographical information before you take notes. See figure 16.1 (for bibliography style) or figure 18.1 (for author-date style) for templates showing what information is needed for several common types of sources.
■ Record the page number(s) for every quotation and paraphrase.
■ As you draft, clearly indicate every place where you may need to cite a source. It is much easier to remove an unnecessary citation when you revise than to remember where you may have relied on someone else’s ideas.
■ When your draft is in its final form, consult chapter 17 or 19 to ensure that each citation is in the correct form, including punctuation and spacing.
■ You can assemble your bibliography or reference list either as you consult your sources or as you draft and revise. Be sure to check each detail carefully.
Getting each citation right may be tedious, but as with every other phase of research, if you anticipate what you need and manage the process from the beginning, you can complete even this least exciting part of research faster, more easily, and more reliably.
If you do the bulk of your bibliographic research online, you may want to consider using citation management software to collect data about your sources. Programs like EndNote, RefWorks, and Zotero are designed to help you build a “library” of citations for a variety of source types. Later you can plug these citations directly into your paper in one of the citation styles described in this manual (referred to in most programs as either “Turabian” or “Chicago” style). A few things to keep in mind:
■ Double-check your data. As you build your library, check each field against the actual source as soon as you acquire the data for it. Make sure that authors’ names, titles of works, dates, and so forth are accurate and that they are entered in the appropriate fields. You will need to do this whether you entered the data yourself or exported the citation from a library catalog or other database.
■ Double-check your citations. Once they’ve been inserted in your paper, make sure each citation is correctly formatted and punctuated according to the citation style you’ve chosen. Review your final draft with extra care. Citation software programs do make errors, and it remains your responsibility to ensure that your citations are accurate. For examples of bibliography-style citations, see chapters 16 and 17; for author-date style, see chapters 18 and 19.
■ Always keep at least two copies of your citations library. If your school lets you keep a copy on its server, make sure you also have a copy on a local drive.
These programs work best for papers that cite only a few types of the most common sources. Articles in academic journals, especially, are easy to work with. If you cite many different types of sources, expect to spend extra time correcting your citations library and editing your final paper. You may choose instead to record the information in the correct citation format yourself, using a word processor or spreadsheet application.