Citation facts for kids

An example of a bibliography

A citation or source citation is a reference to a published work (for example, a book, article, image, etc.,) that is used when creating a written work. It shows readers where specific pieces of information came from and where readers can locate it for themselves. It acknowledges or gives credit to the author who actually created the content being used in a paper. The opposite of a citation is plagiarism, or not giving credit to others for their ideas, concepts, or images. Plagiarism, especially in Academia, is considered taking the work of others and presenting it as one's own. The penalties for plagiarism can be severe. Source citations also give a work credibility. In other words, it shows the information is simply not made up.

What to cite

In general, different academic situations will have different rules for what to cite and how to cite it. Some use footnotes while others may require in-text (also called inline) source citations.(←This is an inline source citation) Some may require a bibliography which lists all works that were used. In some cases, it may only be necessary to provide a list of "works cited." It is important to know in advance what protocols must be used and what citation style (see below) is preferred.

• Quotations Anything taken word-for-word from a source must be shown in quotation marks (" "). The quotation must have a source citation showing where the quoted text came from.

For example: "Quality or junk? How do you want your research described by others?"

• Paraphrase To paraphrase is to take someone's words or ideas and put them in the words of the person writing the paper. Anything paraphrased should be source cited. A paraphrase is usually about the same number of words as the original but does not use quotation marks.

Example (original text): "And there is only one fault so obvious, so fundamental, that it instantly brands a piece of work as the product of an amateur or careless researcher: poor source citations". Paraphrased: Poor quality source citations usually indicate that a piece of work is either careless research or the work of an amateur.

• Summarize A summary is a short version of another work in the writer's own words. A summary is usually shorter than the original. When summarizing someone else's work, a source citation is necessary.

Example (original text): "When you don’t know when to cite, you end up plagiarizing which is just a big word for stealing and that’s mean. And when you plagiarize, you also get an “F” and people think, “Dude, that kid is one dumb bunny.” Let’s avoid that, shall we?" Summarized: When you do not understand source citations, it is easy to plagiarize someone else's work. So you do not get an "F" for your work, the following are the basic rules.

• Facts and ideas Using facts and information to support an argument generally requires a source citation. Facts do not always need to be source cited, especially if they are commonly known (e.g. water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit). Ideas, however, should always be cited.

What is not necessary to cite

You do not need to cite anything that is common knowledge. These are things that would be known by nearly everyone. Examples of common knowledge are:

• Facts that are widely available in many sources. For example: Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States.
• Things that are easy to observe or see. For example: Many people use cell phones today.
• Common sayings. For example: To make a long story short...

But when in doubt, cite it.

Content

Citation content can vary depending on the type of source and may include:

• Book: authors, book title, place of publication, publisher, date of publication, and page numbers if appropriate.
• Journal: authors, article title, journal title, date of publication, and page numbers.
• Newspaper: authors, article title, name of newspaper, section title and page numbers if desired, date of publication.
• Web site: authors, article, and publication title where appropriate, as well as a URL, and a date when the site was accessed.
• Play: inline citations offer part, scene, and line numbers, the latter separated by periods: 4.452 refers to scene 4, line 452. For example, "In Eugene Onegin, Onegin rejects Tanya when she is free to be his, and only decides he wants her when she is already married" (Pushkin 4.452–53).
• Poem: spaced slashes are normally used to indicate separate lines of a poem, and parenthetical citations usually include the line numbers. For example: "For I must love because I live / And life in me is what you give." (Brennan, lines 15–16).
• Interview: name of interviewer, interview descriptor (ex. personal interview), and date of interview.
• Data: authors, dataset title, date of publication, and publisher.

Unique identifiers

Along with information such as authors, date of publication, title and page numbers, citations may also include unique identifiers depending on the type of work being referred to.

• Citations of books may include an International Standard Book Number (ISBN).
• Specific volumes, articles, or other identifiable parts of a periodical, may have an associated Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI) or an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN).
• Electronic documents may have a digital object identifier (DOI).
• Biomedical research articles may have a PubMed Identifier (PMID).

Systems

Broadly speaking, there are two types of citation systems, the Vancouver system and parenthetical referencing.

Vancouver system

The Vancouver system uses sequential numbers in the text, either bracketed or superscript or both. The numbers refer to either footnotes (notes at the end of the page) or endnotes (notes on a page at the end of the paper) that provide source detail. The notes system may or may not require a full bibliography, depending on whether the writer has used a full-note form or a shortened-note form. The organizational logic of the bibliography is that sources are listed in their order of appearance in-text, rather than alphabetically by author last name.

For example, an excerpt from the text of a paper using a notes system without a full bibliography could look like:

"The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance."¹

The note, located either at the foot of the page (footnote) or at the end of the paper (endnote) would look like this:

1. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969) 45–60.

In a paper with a full bibliography, the shortened note might look like:

1. Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying 45–60.

The bibliography entry, which is required with a shortened note, would look like this:

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

In the humanities, many authors also use footnotes or endnotes to supply anecdotal information. In this way, what looks like a citation is actually supplementary material, or suggestions for further reading.

Parenthetical referencing

Parenthetical referencing, also known as Harvard referencing, has full or partial, in-text, citations enclosed in circular brackets and embedded in the paragraph.

An example of a parenthetical reference:

"The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance" (Kübler-Ross, 1969, pp. 45–60).

Depending on the choice of style, fully cited parenthetical references may require no end section. Other styles include a list of the citations, with complete bibliographical references, in an end section, sorted alphabetically by author. This section is often called "References", "Bibliography", "Works cited" or "Works consulted".

In-text references for online publications may differ from conventional parenthetical referencing. A full reference can be hidden, only displayed when wanted by the reader, in the form of a tooltip. This style makes citing easier and improves the reader's experience.

Styles

Citation styles can be broadly divided into styles common to the humanities and the sciences, though there is considerable overlap. Some style guides, such as the Chicago Manual of Style, are quite flexible and cover both parenthetical and note citation systems. Others, such as MLA and APA styles, specify formats within the context of a single citation system. These may be referred to as citation formats as well as citation styles. The various guides thus specify order of appearance, for example, of publication date, title, and page numbers following the author name, in addition to conventions of punctuation, use of italics, emphasis, parenthesis, quotation marks, etc., particular to their style.

A number of organizations have created styles to fit their needs; consequently, a number of different guides exist. Individual publishers often have their own in-house variations as well, and some works are so long-established as to have their own citation methods too: Stephanus pagination for Plato; Bekker numbers for Aristotle; citing the Bible by book, chapter and verse; or Shakespeare notation by play.

The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies.

Humanities

• The Chicago style (CMOS) was developed and its guide is The Chicago Manual of Style. It is most widely used in history and economics as well as some social sciences. The closely related Turabian style—which derives from it—is for student references, and is distinguished from the CMOS by omission of quotation marks in reference lists, and mandatory access date citation.
• The Columbia style was created 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.
• Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace by Elizabeth Shown Mills covers primary sources not included in CMOS, such as censuses, court, land, government, business, and church records. Includes sources in electronic format. Used by genealogists and historians.
• Harvard referencing (or author-date system) is a specific kind of parenthetical referencing. Parenthetical referencing is recommended by both the British Standards Institution and the Modern Language Association. Harvard referencing involves a short author-date reference, e.g., "(Smith, 2000)", being inserted after the cited text within parentheses and the full reference to the source being listed at the end of the article.
• MLA style was developed by the Modern Language Association and is most often used in the arts and the humanities, particularly in English studies, other literary studies, including comparative literature and literary criticism in languages other than English ("foreign languages"), and some interdisciplinary studies, such as cultural studies, drama and theatre, film, and other media, including television. This style of citations and bibliographical format uses parenthetical referencing with author-page (Smith 395) or author-[short] title-page (Smith, Contingencies 42) in the case of more than one work by the same author within parentheses in the text, keyed to an alphabetical list of sources on a "works cited" page at the end of the paper, as well as notes (footnotes or endnotes).
• The MHRA Style Guide is published by the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) and most widely used in the arts and humanities in the United Kingdom, where the MHRA is based. It is available for sale both in the UK and in the United States. It is similar to MLA style, but has some differences. For example, MHRA style uses footnotes that reference a citation fully while also providing a bibliography. Some readers find it advantageous that the footnotes provide full citations, instead of shortened references, so that they do not need to consult the bibliography while reading for the rest of the publication details.

In some areas of the humanities, footnotes are used exclusively for references, and their use for conventional footnotes (explanations or examples) is avoided. In these areas, the term footnote is actually used as a synonym for reference, and care must be taken by editors and typesetters to ensure that they understand how the term is being used by their authors.

Sciences, mathematics, engineering, physiology, and medicine

• The American Chemical Society style, or ACS style, is often used in chemistry and some of the physical sciences. In ACS style references are numbered in the text and in the reference list, and numbers are repeated throughout the text as needed.
• In the style of the American Institute of Physics (AIP style), references are also numbered in the text and in the reference list, with numbers repeated throughout the text as needed.
• Styles developed for the American Mathematical Society (AMS), or AMS styles, such as AMS-LaTeX, are typically implemented using the BibTeX tool in the LaTeX typesetting environment. Brackets with the 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 is also called an "authorship trigraph".
• The Vancouver system, recommended by the Council of Science Editors (CSE), is used in medical and scientific papers and research.
  • In one major variant, that used by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), 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.
  • The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) is reportedly the original kernel of this biomedical style, which evolved from the Vancouver 1978 editors' meeting. The MEDLINE/PubMed database uses this citation style and the National Library of Medicine provides "ICMJE Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals – Sample References".
• The American Medical Association has its own variant of Vancouver style with only minor differences. See AMA Manual of Style.
• The style of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), or IEEE style, encloses citation numbers within square brackets and numbers them consecutively, with numbers repeated throughout the text as needed.
• In areas of biology that falls within the ICNafp (which itself uses this citation style throughout), a variant form of author-title citation is the primary method used when making nomenclatural citations and sometimes general citations (for example in code-related proposals published in Taxon), with the works in question not cited in the bibliography unless also cited in the text. Titles use standardized abbreviations following Botanico-Periodicum-Huntianum for periodicals and Taxonomic Literature 2 (later IPNI) for books.
• Pechenik citation style is a style described in A Short Guide to Writing about Biology, 6th ed. (2007), by Jan A. Pechenik.
• In 1955, Eugene Garfield proposed a bibliographic system for scientific literature, to consolidate the integrity of scientific publications.

Social sciences

• The style of the American Psychological Association, or APA style, published in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, is most often used in social sciences. APA citation style is similar to Harvard referencing, listing the author's name and year of publication, although these can take two forms: name citations in which the surnames of the authors appear in the text and the year of publication then appears in parentheses, and author-date citations, in which the surnames of the authors and the year of publication all appear in parentheses. In both cases, in-text citations point to an alphabetical list of sources at the end of the paper in a "references" section.
• The American Political Science Association publishes both a style manual and a style guide for publications in this field. The style is close to the CMOS.
• The American Anthropological Association utilizes a modified form of the Chicago style laid out in their publishing style guide.
• The ASA style of the American Sociological Association is one of the main styles used in sociological publications.

MLA Works Cited entry

Images for kids

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  xkcd webcomic titled "Wikipedian Protester". The sign says: "[CITATION NEEDED]".

See also

In Spanish: Referencia bibliográfica para niños