Template:Citation

For use of citations in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Citing sources. To cite Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia.

A citation or bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, article, web page or other published item, with sufficient details to uniquely identify the itemTemplate:Fact. Unpublished writings or speech, such as personal communications, are also sometimes citedTemplate:Fact. Citations are provided in scholarly works, bibliographies and indexesTemplate:Fact. The word citation may be used of the act of citing a work as well as to a reference itselfTemplate:Fact.

Citations are used in scholarly works to give credit to or to acknowledge the influence of previous works or to refer to authorityTemplate:Fact. Citations permit readers to put claims to the test by consulting earlier worksTemplate:Fact. Authors often engage earlier work directly, explaining why they agree or differ from earlier views. Ideally, sources are primary (first-hand), recent, with good ethos, credentials, and citationsTemplate:Fact. Some have questioned the authority assumed or conferred by citation, considering it endlessly recursive, the authority of a work resting on its citations, the authority of which in turn rely on their citationsTemplate:Fact.

Varying rules and practices for citations apply in science, law, the theological citing of authority (e.g. the isnad which "back" the hadith in Islam), the prior art that applies in patent law, and marks applied in copyright. Definitions of plagiarism, uniqueness or innovation, trustworthiness or reliability vary so widely among these fields that the use of citations has no simple common practiceTemplate:Fact.

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 the documentTemplate:Fact. They are generally also listed in a works cited page or section - also called the bibliography, source list or list of referencesTemplate:Fact. The recording, use and re-use of citations on computers is facilitated by reference management software, also known as citation management softwareTemplate:Fact.

Citation indexes list published citations of a given workTemplate:Fact. In addition to being used for bibliographic discovery, they are used in bibliometrics for citation analysis and calculation of citation impactTemplate:Fact. The OpenURL standard is the basis for hyperlinks from citations in electronic published works or databases through to electronic copies of the full text of the cited workTemplate:Fact.

Content

Citations to a book generally include at least author(s), book title, publisher and date of publicationTemplate:Fact. Citations to a journal article generally include at least author(s), article title, journal title, volume, date of publication and page numbersTemplate:Fact. Citations to a work on the Internet usually include at least a URL and a date that the work was accessedTemplate:Fact.

Format styles

There are a number of different guides which set styles for the format of citationsTemplate:Fact.

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 sceneTemplate:Fact.

Various organizations have created systems of citation to fit their needsTemplate:Fact. Some of the most important are:

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

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

• 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 historiansTemplate:Fact. It is largely based on that of the Chicago Manual of StyleTemplate:Fact.

• The Bluebook is the citation system traditionally used in American academic legal writing, and the Bluebook (or similar systems derived from it) are used by many courtsTemplate:Fact. The dominance of the Bluebook is currently being challenged by the newer ALWD Citation ManualTemplate:Fact. 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 clausesTemplate:Fact. Inline citation is controversial among lawyers, because it is thought to be one of the reasons why most laypersons find legal writing hard to readTemplate:Fact.

• The CBE style is the Council of Biology Editors style format, which is most often used in scientific papers and researchTemplate:Fact.

• The Chicago Style was developed and its guide is The Chicago Manual of StyleTemplate:Fact. Some social sciences and humanities scholars use the nearly identical Turabian styleTemplate:Fact.

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

• 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 basedTemplate:Fact. 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 endTemplate:Fact. Its major advantage is that a reader does not need to consult the bibliography to find a reference as the footnote provides all the detailsTemplate:Fact. The guide is available for free download [1]Template:Fact.

• MLA style was developed by The Modern Language AssociationTemplate:Fact and is most often used in English studiesTemplate:Fact, comparative literatureTemplate:Fact, foreign-language literary criticismTemplate:Fact, and some other fields in the humanitiesTemplate:Fact. MLA style uses a Works Cited Page to list works at the end of the paperTemplate:Fact. Brief parenthetical citations, which include an author and page (if applicable), are used within the textTemplate:Fact. These direct readers to the work of the author on the list of works citedTemplate:Fact, 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.

See also

• Acknowledgment (creative arts)
• Bekker numbers for citations of Aristotle
• Citation impact
• Citation signal
• Citationality
• Credit (creative arts)
• Scholarly method
• Stephanus pagination for citations of Plato
• Bible citation
• Case citation
• Legal citation

References

• American Psychological Association (2001) Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Fifth Edition. American Psychological Association. ISBN 1557987912
• Gibaldi, J. (2003) MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (6th Ed). Modern Language Association. ISBN 0873529863
• Walker, J and Taylor, T. (1998) The Columbia Guide to Online Style. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231107897

External links

Guidelines

• Radford, Robert, How to write footnotes or endnotes.
• Psychology with Style: A Hypertext Writing Guide
• General Guidelines for Citing Government Publications
• Guide to Citation Style Guides

Style guides

• A Guide for Writing Research Papers Based on Modern Language Association (MLA) Documentation
• AMA Citation Style
• An online guide to different citation formats
• APA Style.org
• Citation Styles Handbook: APA
• Citation Styles Handbook: MLA
• Citing Electronic Documentation (APA, Chicago, MLA)
• Using American Psychological Association (APA) Format (Updated to 5th Edition)
• The Columbia Guide to Online Style
• Chicago/Turabian Documentation
• Citation Guide - Turabian (.PDF file)
• Sociology style (ASR)

Tools

• Inflight Referencer, software that creates APA, Harvard and custom citations and bibliography lists.
• The Citation Machine, a site which generates full MLA and APA citations.
• The Citation Functions: Literary Production and Reception by The (In)Citers, featuring full position statements and citation bibliography
• CiteULike.org - 'CiteULike: Everyone's library' (citation compilation wiki)
• [2], a site that presents the format used by the APSA.
• [3], the page on the APSA site listing its publications, including the Style Manual for Political Science (for purchase)
• StudentABC - Citation Machine Automatically generate an APA or MLA citation from a URL

Other

• Unread citations