Template:Citation

A citation or bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other published item, with sufficient detail to allow a reader to locate it. Different citation styles and systems are used in scientific citation, legal citation, theological citation, prior art, patent law, and copyright law.

Citation styles tend to have a two-part structure: a style for citing material within the text, in the form of a footnote, endnote, or Harvard reference, and another style for providing a full citation in a bibliography section.

Content

Citations include:

• of a book: author(s), book title, publisher, date of publication, and page number(s) if appropriate;
• of a journal article: author(s), article title, journal title, volume and issue numbers, date of publication, and page number(s);
• of a newspaper: author(s), article title, name of newspaper, section title and page number(s) if desired, date of publication;
• of a work on the Web: author(s), article and publication title where appropriate, as well as a URL, and a date when the site was accessed.

Styles

Template:Main There are a number of different style guides. 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, which is most often used in social sciences. APA style uses Harvard referencing within the text, listing the author's name and year of publication, keyed to an alphabetical list of sources at the end of the paper on a References page.
• 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.
• The ASA style of American Sociological Association is one of the main styles used in sociological publications.
• 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.
• Harvard referencing (or author-date system) 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.
• 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. Harvard referencing is used within the text, keyed to an alphabetical list of sources on a Works Cited page at the end of the paper. See the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

Legal

• 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.

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 Vancouver system, recommended by the Council of Science Editors, is used in medical and scientific papers and research.
  • In one major variant, 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.
• Pechenik is a style described in "A Short Guide to Writing about Biology" by Jan A. Pechenik.
• CiteSmart, a software progam to work with bibliographies.

See also

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

Further reading

Guidelines

• "What is citation?", Turnitin.com.
• Citing Government Documents/Government Agency Style Manuals, University of North Texas Libraries.
• 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.
• Citation Machine for MLA, APA, Chicago, and Turabian formats

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

• AMA Citation Style
• Swarthmore library's Guide to Citation Styles for Science and Humanities.