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Making & UnderstandingCitations

Not too many people enjoy making citations, but they are very important for lots of reasons.

First, you need to put them in to make a good grade and to keep from getting in trouble, but more importantly…

Well-made citations help others find the sources of your opinions and information so that they can come to an understanding of the topic of your paper. Ultimately, this includes you when you are reading someone else’s paper.

On the other hand, poorly-made citations only make everyone, including yourself, angry.

This tutorial will briefly discuss the tools and methods of making well-made citations.

Making & UnderstandingCitations

There are many places on the web to get help on making citations.

In the Plagiarism, Copyright and Citations workshop in AUR Library Wiki, there is a web page of some of the best citation guides created by other universities and placed on the web .

See also the style manuals in the Library’s collection.

To begin,

The basic purpose of making citations is to let others know what the sources are for your argument, so that they can find them too.

Therefore, it is very important that citations are accurate, concise and clear. This is also why they must conform to certain standards so that people know, e.g. exactly what is the title of an article and what is the title of the journal.

But the fact is, different places have different standards.

What is important to realize however, is that it is basically the same information, just formatted slightly differently

Basic Purpose

The reason why some citations have page numbers and some don’t is that some formats put the page number in the text, itself

This citation format includes the page number here.

Here, there will be the reference:

(Rolfe 123) in the text.

Examples of formats

A single article from a book must give the name of the article, along with the title of the book, otherwise, you could never find it.

Examples of citations

A single article from an issue of a journal must have the title of the journal, but also, enough information to identify which issue it was in.

In this example, if you just put in Architects’ Journal, people would have to look through hundreds of volumes!

You may need some help with an abbreviated journal title.

Examples of citations

A citation from one volume of a multi-volume set must have enough information to find the individual volume.

Plutarch, Bernadotte Perrin, and J. W. Cohoon. Plutarch's Lives. 11 v. The Loeb classical library. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1914.

MLA format

Works cited page

(Plutarch 7 : 269)

Parenthetical citation

Examples of citations

Digital versions of print materials are very simple to do.

Just make the normal citation for the printed version, and then add the information about the electronic aspect.

Examples of citations

Web-only materials have different problems and the citations must deal with them.

For example, internet sites often disappear, and there are no page numbers to cite. Therefore, the URL and the date of access become extremely important so that if the page disappears, it can still be found in the Internet Archive.

See: Finding Disappearing Websites in the Wiki

Schrader, Alvin. "INTERNET CENSORSHIP: Issues for teacher-librarians." Teacher Librarian 26.5 (May 1999): 8. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. [The American University of Rome Library], [Rome, Italy]. 16 Mar. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=1934831&site=ehost-live>.

Foster, S. K., Paulk, A., & Dastoor, B. R. (1999). Can we really teach test-taking skills? New Horizons in Adult Education, 13 (1). Retrieved February 7, 2000, from http://www.nova.edu/~aed/newhorizons.html

Article from a Database: No page numbers because there are none on this webpage.

Article from an Internet Journal with no Print Equivalent

Examples of citations

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See also: Automatic CitationsCitation GuidesCitations, Plagiarism & Copyright Workshop

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Making & UnderstandingCitations