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A citation or bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other published item with sufficient detail to identify the item uniquely.Template:Fact Unpublished writings or speech, such as working papers and personal communications, are also sometimes cited.Template:Fact Citations are provided in scholarly works, bibliographies, and indexes. The word citation may also mean the act of citing a work, that is, providing a reference to the work in the form of a bibliographic citation.Template:Fact

Citations are used in scholarly works to give credit to or acknowledge the influence of previous works, or to refer to authorities. Citations permit readers to put claims to the test by consulting earlier works. Authors often engage earlier work directly, explaining why they agree with, or differ from, earlier views.Template:Fact Ideally, sources are primary (first-hand) and recent.

Varying rules and practices for citations apply in scientific citation, legal citation, theological citation, prior art, patent law, and copyright law. Definitions of plagiarism, uniqueness, innovation, trustworthiness, and reliability vary so widely among these fields that the use of citations has no simple common practice.

Citations may be made in the body of text as parenthetical citations, in footnotes at the bottom of pages, or in endnotes at the end of a document. They may also be listed in a “works cited” page or section, in a bibliography, or in a list of references.

The recording, use, and reuse of citations on computers is facilitated by reference management software, also known as citation management software.

Citation indexes list published citations between various works. In addition to being used for bibliographic discovery, they are used in bibliometrics for citation analysis and the calculation of citation impact.

Content

Citations of a book generally include at least author(s), book title, publisher, and date of publication. Citations of a journal article generally include at least author(s), article title, journal title, volume, pages, and date of publication.

Citations of a work on the Internet usually include at least a URL and a date when the work was accessed.

Format styles

There are a number of different guides which set styles for the format of citations.

Some works are so long established as to have their own citation methods: Stephanus pagination for Plato; Bekker numbers for Aristotle; line numbers in poems; Bible citation by book, chapter and verse; or Shakespeare notation by play, act and scene.

Various organizations have created systems of citation to fit their needs. They can broadly be divided into styles common to the Humanities and the Sciences, though there is considerable overlap. Individual publishers often have their own in-house variations. Some of the most important are:

Humanities

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See also

• Acknowledgment (creative arts)
• Case citation
• Citation creator
• Citation signal
• Citationality
• Credit (creative arts)
• Cross-reference
• Scholarly method
• Source evaluation

External links

Guidelines

• Citing Electronic Documentation (APA, Chicago, MLA)
• General Guidelines for Citing US Government Publications
• Guide to Citation Style Guides
• ONLINE! Citation Styles (An online guide to different citation formats)
• Document it Citation and Referencing tool
• Author Packages for Publishing with the AMS, and the AMSRefs package.

Examples

• Illustrated examples, generated using BibTeX, of several major styles, including more than those listed above.
• PDF file bibstyles.pdf illustrates how several bibliographic styles appear with citations and reference entries, generated using BibTeX.

Style guides

• Citation Guide Guide to writing citations in any format, plus Killer Bib Tool that formats citations automatically.
• AMA Citation Style
• Citation Machine - an interactive web tool designed to assist high school, college, and university students, their teachers, and independent researchers in their effort to respect other people's intellectual properties
• Swarthmore library's Guide to Citation Styles for Science and Humanities.