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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. Unpublished writings or speech, such as working papers and personal communications, are also sometimes cited. 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.

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. 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.

Works Cited Bruck, David. “The Death Penalty.” 40 Model Essays. Ed. Jane E. Aaron. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005. 327 – 331. “Capital Punishment Today.” Newsweek. July 2005. < www.galegroup.com>. “Home Schooling.” The Education Liberator Mar. 1997 <http://www.sepschool.org>. Jensen, Marlene. Women Who Want to Be Boss. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Inc., 1987. Jones, Thomas, Arthur F. McGovern. Ethical Dilemmas in Corporations. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:: Prentice Inc., 1998 Jones, Thomas, George Grabel, and Amanda Atkins. A Source of Triumph. Westville, Illinois: Random House, 1998. Lewis, Peter H. “Software to Help You Wax Poetic.” Time 27 Sept. 1998: C5 “Newsreel.” Encyclopedia Americana. 1997 ed. “Work Life is Leaving Less Time for Living.” Article. The Boston Globe 21 Aug. 1998: 1+.

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

• The APA style is the American Psychological Association style format which is most often used in social sciences. APA style lists sources at the end of the paper, on a References Page. Listing electronic sources of information is more detailed in APA style than in MLA style. APA style uses parenthetical citation within the text, listing the author's name and the year the work was made. These work much like the MLA style's parenthetical citations.

• The American Political Science Association (APSA) publication on citation is the Style Manual for Political Science, which is a system often used by political science scholars and historians. It is largely based on that of the Chicago Manual of Style. Template:Fact

• The ASA style of American Sociological Association is one of the main styles used in sociological publications.Template:Fact

• The Bluebook is a citation system traditionally used in American academic legal writing, and the Bluebook (or similar systems derived from it) are used by many courts. At present, academic legal articles are always footnoted, but motions submitted to courts and court opinions traditionally use inline citations which are either separate sentences or separate clauses. Inline citation is controversial among lawyers, because it is thought to be one of the reasons why most laypersons find legal writing hard to read.

• The Chicago Style was developed and its guide is The Chicago Manual of Style. Some social sciences and humanities scholars use the nearly identical Turabian style. Used by writers in many fields.

• The Columbia Style was made by Janice R. Walker and Todd Taylor to give detailed guidelines for citing internet sources. Columbia Style offers models for both the humanities and the sciences. More information can be found in The Columbia Guide to Online Style.

• The Harvard Style is recommended by the British Standards Institution and involves a short reference (e.g Smith, 2000) being inserted after the cited text in parenthesis and the full reference being listed at the end of the article.

• The MHRA Style Guide is the Modern Humanities Research Association style format and is most often used in the arts and humanities, particularly in the United Kingdom where the MHRA is based. It is fairly similar to the MLA style, but with some differences. The style guide uses footnotes that fully reference a citation and has a bibliography at the end. Its major advantage is that a reader does not need to consult the bibliography to find a reference as the footnote provides all the details. The guide is available for free download [1].

• MLA style was developed by The Modern Language Association and is most often used in English studies, comparative literature, foreign-language literary criticism, and some other fields in the humanities. MLA style uses a Works Cited Page to list works at the end of the paper. Brief parenthetical citations, which include an author and page (if applicable), are used within the text. These direct readers to the work of the author on the list of works cited, and the page of the work where the information is located (e.g. (Smith 107) refers the reader to page 107 of the work made by someone named Smith). More information can be found in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

• Author-date system

Sciences

• The ACS style is the American Chemical Society style format and is often used in chemical literature.

• In AIP, American Institute of Physics, references in most physics journals are numbered in the text and the reference list.

• The AMS styles, e.g., AMS-LaTeX, are styles developed for the American Mathematical Society (AMS), typically implemented using the BibTeX tool in the LaTeX typesetting environment. Brackets with author’s initials and year are inserted in the text and at the beginning of the reference. Typical citations are listed in-line with alphabetic-label format, e.g., [AB90]. This type of style can also be called a "Authorship trigraph."

• The CSE/CBE style is the Council of Biology Editors style format, which is most often used in scientific papers and research.

• The IEEE Style is commonly used in technical fields, particularly in computer science. In IEEE style, citations are numbered, but citation numbers are included in the text in square brackets rather than as superscripts. All bibliographical information is exclusively included in the list of references at the end of the document, next to the respective citation number. For more information, see IEEE Style Documentation.

• Pechenik is a style described in "A Short Guide to Writing about Biology" by Jan A. Pechenik.

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.