Writing Papers for Me

 Quick Stop: Citing Sources

Step-by-step

I. First, you do research. Then, you write (and cite sources). So, correctly citing those sources is only the third step along the way. Consider:

Research widely. Don't just go out and grab the first thing you see. By using a range or resources you can be sure that you have investigated a topic from a variety of perspectives and with sufficient depth.

Research thoughtfully. Certain kinds of information may only exist in a particular type of source. For example, it is unlikely that a breaking news event will be discussed in a journal or book because of their position on a publishing timeline. Similarly, when you find an article on the brain and language by way of Google Scholar, and you notice that it was published in 1956, you realize that science has proceded a long way since then. For that scholar, the X-Ray was still a big deal, and CAT Scans, fMRIs, and such were not even on the horizon. So, unless you are investigating the history of the subject, you narrow your preferences by date and search again.

Consider your search engine's focus. If you realize that types of sources (e.g., books and journal articles) are missing from your bibliography on a current political event, you should ask yourself "Why?" Daily newspapers and news blogs report events immediately but are less likely to include background on a crisis or they may treat long-term chronic conditions superficially. When you realize you have information for who, what, where and when but not why, your will need to consider locating other types of resources like books and journal articles to understand the context of a current news event.

Consider the text's focus and likely truth value, purpose, and audience. By now, you realize that everything you find in print is not necessarily true. That's even more the case with websites. Anybody can put something on the web. The scholarly press is not primarily designed for non-specialists who are lacking at least some college education. Similarly, a headline in the National Enquirer proclaiming the 'fact' that Tom Hanks has just given birth to an alien's love child may not represent a scholarly opinion. The publications are serving different audiences and have different purposes as well. A scholarly article is harder to read and uses specialized vocabulary. It is designed for transparency and reproducability; in that sense, it empowers the reader to a greater degree, or at least in different ways, than does the popular press. A scholarly press article is designed to let the reader retrace the thought and research processes of the author or team.

Consider the author's level of expertise. Google the author. Consider that person's training and other publications. Is the author an expert in the field, just a dabbler, or someone who's simply doing a bit of reporting and for the most part lacking in any in depth knowledge in the field. Or...and this is important to know...is the author a quack or person riding a personal hobby horse, a person operating more out of faith than intellect and data?

II. Then You Cite Sources:

A. You must cite all your sources, whether you are directly quoting materials or you are paraphrasing. It does not matter whether you are quoting one word or many, a full sentence, a phrase, or a paragraph. It's not just an English Department or university rule, it's the law.

In his "Crash Course in Copyright", Georgia Harper, General Counsel, University of Texas, explains that

Someone owns just about everything
Fair use lets you use their things
—But not as much as you'd like to
Sometimes you have to ask for permission
Sometimes you are the owner—think about that!

A bibliography is not a form to complete just for your professor. Rather, a bibliography acknowledges your debt to others and offers help to the next "generation" of researchers, your readers. By structuring the way you collect, organize, and update information sources, a bibliography supports your thinking process and the development of your personal perspective. In being an ethical researcher who documents the work of others, you are becoming part of the academic community, contributing to the creative commons and to future intellectual work in this field.

B. How to Cite Sources:
Remember—you do this twice within each document for each element in your paper that isn't common knowledge for the average person on the street whether that element is directly quoted or paraphrased (put in your own words).

What is meant by that? Let's consider an example: If you say in your paper that the Atlantic Ocean is to the east of here (Lancaster, Pa.), that's common knowedge and doesn't need to be cited. The Atlantic Ocean covers 22% of the earth's surface ("Atlantic Ocean," Wikipedia). The average person on the street would need to look that up, so we provide a source for that. And, we do it in two places:

1. Within the text as either parenthetical citation, OR footnotes, OR endnotes.
   1. Placed parenthetically within the body of the text, presuming we're using standard MLA format. Note that w
      Rule of thumb:
   • When the parenthetical citation goes within the end punctuation, as in the Wikipedia citation above, it is indicating that the citation covers only the material within that sentence.
              Example:
              The Atlantic Ocean covers 22% of the earth's surface ("Atlantic
               Ocean," Wikipedia). 
   • If the author wants the citation to cover more than a single sentence, place it outside the end punctuation. If, for example, the sentence shown above were laid out as follows, it would indicate that the Wikipedia article covered all previous material in that paragraph back until the last parenthetical cition (if any).
              Example:
              The Atlantic Ocean covers 22% of the earth's surface. ("Atlantic
               Ocean," Wikipedia)                                     
   2. Otherwise we might use a footnote or endnote.
   1. If the author uses foot- or endnotes, those are generally numbered.
   2. Foot- or endnotes can also be used for explanatory notes as well as cited sources.
   3. These days, since it's so easy to do copy/paste, authors rarely use Ibid. (Latin, short for ibidem, "the same place", referring to the immediately previous citation and meaning about the same thing as ditto marks) or Op. cit. (Latin, short for opus citatum/opere citato, meaning "the work cited/from the cited work"; referring the reader to an earlier citation).
2. In the Work Cited section at the bottom of the paper, which must be alphebetized. Note that in MLA and APA format, it is NOT numbered.

Paraphrase vs. Quoted Materials: In either case, you must cite your sources. Note that I didn't directly quote Wikipedia in my statement above about the relative size of the Atlantic Ocean. It doesn't matter. I still must cite the source of the information. Cite everything the person on the street might not know. It's not just that you're trying to avoid plagiarism charges. It's that you are trying to assist your reader in researching things further. The very fact that you are writing a document says that you're trying to provide a service for your reader. Because students are in school for so long, they tend to loose track of that basic reality. It is important that readers have the ability not only to check the author's facts and assumptions but also to do further research into the subject. Your paper should facilitate both of those activities.

Parenthetical Citation vs. Traditional Endnotes or Footnotes with Superscript Numbers (humanities).

It doesn't in the least matter which format you use. They provide the same information. No matter which you use, you also need a Work Cited section. Sometimes, you may also have a Bibliography. What's the difference? The Work Cited section provides information only on the elements you actually dealt with in the body of your paper. Sometimes, you may wish to provide a larger resource showing in addition other materials that your reader might find helpful when doing further research. In that instance, the bibliography would include all the materials inthe work cited section and in addition other materials that you would recommend.

Citing Web Resources: Work Cited section and/or Bibliography

Layout:

1. Formal print format papers show Work Cited elements with a hanging indent. That's not easily done with web pages, so here you'll see bib elements aligned evenly on the left.
2. Italicize the titles of books, periodicals, and other long works. Put the titles of articles, book chapters, short stories, and other short works in quotation marks.

Basic Style for Citations of Electronic Sources: Most of us rarely go to a physical library these days, but we find more data than researchers ever have in the past. Why? Because these days, virtually everything you find has come by way of your computer. Here are some common features you should try and find before citing electronic sources in MLA style. Always include as much information as is available/applicable:

• Author and/or editor names
• Name of the database, or title of project, book, article
• Any version numbers available
• Date of version, revision, or posting
• Publisher information
• Date you accessed the material
• Electronic address, printed between carets ([<, >]).

So, a typical bibliographic item will look like this:

Name of Site. Date of Posting/Revision. Name of institution/organization affiliated with the site (sometimes found in copyright statements). Date you accessed the site [electronic address].

What if there's no date of posting? Then, just say n.d. for "no date".

Do you want to create a website rather than a print document. If so, make the site the live hotbutton, not the web address. Why? Becuase the web address is often quite long, and could throw the layout and design of the web page you're creating out of whack, and also because it's not what you're actually wanting to access--the site itself is. It is necessary to list your date of access because web postings are often updated, and information available on one date may no longer be available later. Be sure to include the complete address for the site. Please note that I do not list the search engine or index through which I found the materials. That's irrelevant.

Example

The Purdue OWL. 26 April, 2008. The Writing Lab and OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. 23 August 2008 <http://owl.english.purdue.edu>.

Individual Resources: Here, however, we're talking about a particular web page or group of pages.

Purdue OWL. "MLA Formatting and Style Guide." The Online Writing Lab at Purdue. 10 May 2008. Purdue University Writing Lab. 12 July 2008 <http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/>.

Long URLs

URLs that won't fit on one line of your Works Cited list should be broken at slashes, when possible.

Some Web sites have unusually long URLs that would be virtually impossible to retype; others use frames, so the URL appears the same for each page. To address this problem, either refer to a site's search URL, or provide the path to the resource from an entry page with an easier URL. Begin the path with the word Path followed by a colon, followed by the name of each link, separated by a semicolon. For example, the Amazon.com URL for customer privacy and security information is <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/
tg/browse/-/551434/104-0801289-6225502>, so we'd need to simplify the citation:

Amazon.com. "Privacy and Security." 22 May 2006 <http://www.amazon.com/>. Path: Help; Privacy & Security.

A Page on a Web Site: For an individual page on a Web site, list the author or alias if known, followed by the information covered above for entire Web sites. Make sure the URL points to the exact page you are referring to, or the entry or home page for a collection of pages you're referring to:

"Caret." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 28 April 2006. 10 May 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Caret&oldid=157510440>.

"How to Make Vegetarian Chili." eHow.com. 10 May 2006 <http://www.ehow.com/
how_10727_make-vegetarian-chili.html>.

Stolley, Karl. "MLA Formatting and Style Guide." The OWL at Purdue. 10 May 2006. Purdue University Writing Lab. 12 May 2006 <http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/>.

Citing the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary and Other online sources: A citation of any online dictionary or thesaurus should include the following information:

• headword of the entry cited (in quotes)
• title of the source (in italics)
• date the dictionary or thesaurus was published, posted, or revised (Use the copyright date noted at the bottom of this and every page of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.)
• full URL of the site (up to and including the file name)
• date you accessed the dictionary (in parentheses)

Always italicize or underscore book titles, and put words discussed as words in quotation marks or italicize. Within the text, clearly state which work you are citing. In the bibliography or work cited section, tere are three ways you might cite the entry for a word like hacker in the 2008 edition of the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, if you accessed it on March 8, 2009.

"hacker." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2008. http://www.merriam-webster.com (accessed 8 March 2009).

• MLA Style:
  "hacker." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2008. Merriam-Webster Online. 8 March 2009<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hacker>
• APA Style:
  hacker. 2008. In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.
  Retrieved March 8, 2009, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hacker

Note: Individuals using Wikipedia should use the "cite this article" link located in the "toolbox" area on the right side of the navigation. The link will provide a stable URL that Wikipedia recommends using when citing.

An Article in a Web Magazine or Scholarly Journal

Author(s). "Title of Article." Title of Online Publication. Date of Publication. Date of Access <electronic address>.

For example:

Bernstein, Mark. "10 Tips on Writing The Living Web." A List Apart: For People Who Make Websites. No. 149 (16 Aug. 2002). 4 May 2006 <http://alistapart.com/articles/writeliving>.

An Article in an Online Scholarly Journal

Online scholarly journals are treated differently than online popular press magazines. First, you must include volume and issue information, when available. Also, some electronic journals and magazines provide paragraph or page numbers; again, include them if available.

Wheelis, Mark. "Investigating Disease Outbreaks Under a Protocol to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention." Emerging Infectious Diseases 6.6 (2000): 33 pars. 8 May 2006 <http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol6no6/wheelis.htm>.

An Article from an Electronic Subscription Service (This format is not necessary for my classes, though you may use it if you wish):

When citing material accessed via an electronic subscription service (e.g., a database or online collection your library subscribes to), cite the relevant publication information as you would for a periodical (author, article title, periodical title, and volume, date, and page number information) followed by the name of the database or subscription collection, the name of the library through which you accessed the content, including the library's city and state, plus date of access. If a URL is available for the home page of the service, include it. Do not include a URL to the article itself, because it is not openly accessible. Note: You do not have to do this for things found through Google Scholar. You don't need to use it at all in this class, as the univeristy provides me access to the same subscription services you do. Here's how you'd do it:

For example:

Grabe, Mark. "Voluntary Use of Online Lecture Notes: Correlates of Note Use and Note Use as an Alternative to Class Attendance." Computers and Education 44 (2005): 409-21. ScienceDirect. Millersville Univeristy Library, Millersville Pa., 28 May 2006 <http://www.sciencedirect.com/>.

Formatting Choices: A Review

Which should you use, footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical citation? I don't care. Remember though: in either case you also need a work cited and/or bibliography section at the end. What do I mean and/or? Sometimes both are used, the work cited for all those works that actually were cited in the paper, and also a bibliography that includes all of those but also adds more materials you would recommend on the subject to aid in the interested reader's own research.

The system of footnotes/endnotes consists of small raised numbers within the text signalling footnotes (bottom of the page)or endnotes (end of the article, chapter, or book), followed by a bibliography. This used to be the standard method of documentation everywhere. It is still preferred by some humanities disciplines (including History) and some sciences because it interrupts the essay very little. It's easy for the reader to follow, but harder for the writer to set up. You can choose either endnotes or footnotes, according to convenience (and let your word-processor help you deal with them).

The alternative (preferred by MLA) is parenthetical citation, in which the information resides right in the body of the text itself. Both systems also require a Work Cited section, though other systems call that "Bibliography" or some other term. That's not a matter of substance so much as label, but you do need to be aware that the layout of the item is different in each system.

See the example below for a demonstration, and also keep these points in mind:

• Even in this system, use parentheses within your prose to give page or line numbers for primary texts you're analysing (e.g. documents or works of literature). Use a note only for the first such reference, to indicate the edition you're using.
  
• When you refer to a source the second time, you can shorten the note by using only the author's last name and the page number (e.g., Singh 435). That's easier than learning the old-fashioned system of Latin abbreviations such as op. cit. ("in the same work") and ibid. ("in the same place").
  
• In listing a Web page as a source, include the date you read the page as well as the URL. That information lets your reader judge whether he or she is seeing the same version of the Web page you looked at. See also our note on Electronic Sources.

Three ways to cite your sources: A comparison. There are other ways to do it, but these are the big three you'll run upon in the Humanities, Business, and the Social Sciences

I. MLA System: Parenthetical Author-Page References (humanities)
This streamlined format gives author and page in parentheses within the text of the paper, then sets out full references in a Works Cited (or Works Consulted) list. It does not use footnotes or endnotes at all. Developed by the Modern Language Association, it is now widely accepted in the humanities. The 2003 edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers gives detailed advice and examples. It includes sections on non-print sources such as films, paintings, and sound recordings, and now on Internet sources such as Web pages. See also the MLA website for recommendations on details of referring to non-print sources.

Example of a paragraph of text: the information about sources is shown parenthetically. Note that when the author (or play in the case of Hamlet) is shown in the text, the name does not need to be repeated in the parenthetical information. It's just necessary that the information can be easily found in the Work Cited section. When the author is not clearly noted in the sentence, show him or her in the parenthetical explanation. It is not strictly necessary to show the author and citation for each sentence. Had this author, for example, begun the paragraph speaking about Singh's perspective, and continued that for the rest of the paragraph, then the page(s) involved (here, that's 434) could be shown at the end of the paragraph. Rule of thumb: if you are citing for the preceding paragraph, show the information inside the closing punctuation (example: inner turmoil" (434).) If, on the other hand, you are referencing several preceding sentences, then put the parenthetical citation outside the closing punctuation. Remember always that you must cite sources whether you directly quote, paraphrase, or summarize what the author has said.

When Hamlet protests to his mother, "Leave wringing of your hands" (III.iv.35), he is naming a universally recognizable gesture. As Singh says, similar broad physical movements are "still the most direct way of indicating inner turmoil" (434). Zygmundi confirms their continuing usefulness in contemporary productions of other sixteenth-century plays ("Acting"). Renaissance audiences would have recognized hand-wringing as a signal for inner distress (Brown 111), specifically for a condition that the Elizabethan author Reynolds named "ague of the spirits" (qtd. in Mahieu 69).

Now, at the bottom of the paper, you will provide an alphabetical list of the work you cited as follows:

Works Cited

Brown, Joan. The Renaissance Stage. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996.

Mahieu, Aline. Acting Shakespeare. Toronto: Gibson, 2003.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, Kelly J. Mays, and Jerome Beaty. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2001. 941-1033.
Singh, Jasmine. "Renovating Hamlet for Contemporary Audiences." UTQ 67 (1998): 431-42.

Zygmundi, David. "Acting Out the Moralities for Today's Audiences." n.d. Termagant Society Online. 31 Nov. 2002 http://www.nouniv.ca/soc/termagant/moral.html.

[Note: Did you notice that I used n.d. here because the website did not provide a date the piece was mounted on the web or last revised?]

II. APA System: Parenthetical Author-Date References (social sciences)

The social sciences, management studies, and many sciences emphasize the author and date as the most important information about a source. The American Psychological Association (APA) has developed the most commonly used system. See the latest edition of the Publication Manual of the APA for very detailed advice on formatting a manuscript for publication. The APA website now includes rules on reference formats for Web sources.

This system uses only initials for authors' given names, does not use quotation marks or angle brackets, uses minimal capitalization for titles of books and articles, and italicizes volume numbers as well as journal titles. Strict APA format gives page numbers only for actual quotations (not for paraphrases or summaries), though some modified formats give them for all references. Ask your instructor when to give page numbers.

Students using the APA system are usually asked to format their papers as if they were manuscripts being prepared for publication; that's why the examples here and in the APA Publication Manual don't look exactly like what you see in journals or books. Here is an example in APA manuscript format:

A group of statisticians, for instance, has re-analysed published data and argued that the compound words claimed as inventions of one chimpanzee are only the results of repeated random juxtapositions (Tannenbaum, Leung, Sudha, & White, 1996). Even more damagingly, Pinker (1994) summarizes the skepticism of various original researchers and observers about whether the signs produced in the Washoe project were really American Sign Language. His conclusion is that chimpanzees' abilities at "anything one would want to call language" (p. 339) are almost nil. Experiments being conducted by Zelasko (2004) have so far failed to confirm the results originally claimed for chimpanzee learning of compound words.

APA format uses References, which looks like this:

References

Pinker, Steven. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York: Morrow.

Tannenbaum, R. V., Leung, K., Sudha, J. R., & White, M. A. (1996). A re-examination of the record: Pitty Sing's creation of compound words. Journal of Biostatistics, 9, 368-396.

Zelasko, J. "Learning and teaching words: Guided language acquisition among chimpanzees." American Psychologist, 57, 750-765. Retrieved September 20, 2004, from http://www.apa.org/journals/ap53/zelasko.html.

III. Turabian/ Chicago Style. The excerpt below follows the system set out in Turabian, Manual for Writers, 6th edition. You may also want to consult the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. It is often used in business and publishing.

Example:

When Hamlet protests to his mother, "Leave wringing of your hands" (III.iv.35),¹ he is naming a universally recognizable gesture. As Singh says, similar broad physical movements are "still the most direct way of indicating inner turmoil."² Zygmundi confirms their continuing usefulness in contemporary productions of other sixteenth-century plays.³ Renaissance audiences would have recognized hand-wringing as a signal for inner distress,⁴ specifically for a condition that the Elizabethan author Reynolds named "ague of the spirits."⁵

Here, we have end or footnotes, and in addition need a bibliography section. These look like this:

Notes

¹ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Introduction to Literature, 8th ed., ed. Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, Kelly J. Mays, and Jerome Beaty (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 996. Subsequent parenthetical references will refer to this edition.

² Jasmine Singh, "Renovating Hamlet for Contemporary Audiences," UTQ 67 (Summer 1998): 434.

³ David Zygmundi, "Acting Out the Moralities for Today's Audiences," n.d. Termagant Society Online, accessed 22 August 2005. <http://www.nouniv.ca/soc/termagant/moral.html>.

⁴ Joan Brown, The Renaissance Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 111.

⁵ Peter Reynolds, The Player's Chapbooke, 1587; quoted in Aline Mahieu, Acting Shakespeare (Toronto: Gibson, 2003), 69.

Bibliography^*

Brown, Joan. The Renaissance Stage. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Mahieu, Aline. Acting Shakespeare. Toronto: Gibson, 2003.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. In The Norton Introduction to Literature, 8th ed., ed. Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, Kelly J. Mays, and Jerome Beaty. 941-1033. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

Singh, Jasmine. "Renovating Hamlet for Contemporary Audiences." UTQ 67 (Summer 1998): 431-42.

Zygmundi, David. "Acting Out the Moralities for Today's Audiences." n.d. Termagant Society Online. Accessed 22 August 2004. <http://www.nouniv.ca/terma/moral.html>.

NOTE:

When using word processing software, you would offset with a 5 character hanging indent which cannot easily be reproducted in a web docuement..

In listing a Web page as a source, include the date you read the page (accessed or date found) as well as the URL. That information lets your reader judge whether he or she is seeing the same version of the web page you looked at. See also our note on Electronic Sources.

Work Cited

"Academic Integrity." Millersville University." (n.d.). Date found: 19 March, 2007 at <http://www.millersville.edu/english/community/acadint/>.

"Citing Sources." Duke University Libraries. 2 June 2008. Date found: 1 December, 2008 at <http://library.duke.edu/research/citing/>.

Harper, Georgia. " Copyright Crash Course." University of Texas, 2001. Date found: 1 December, 2008 at <http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/cprtindx.htm>.

"The Learning Page: Citing Electronic Resources." The Library of Congress. 2006 Date found: 1 December 2008 at <http://memory.loc.gov/learn/start/cite/index.html>.

"MLA Format and Style Guide." Purdue University. 1995-2008. Date found: 1 December 2008 at <http://www.millersville.edu/english/community/acadint/>.

Software for formatting bibliography elements:

• Noodle Tools. (n.d.) Date found: 1 December 2008 at <http://www.noodletools.com/>
• "Son of Citation Machine." The Landmark Project. n.d.. 30 Nov 2008 <http://www.citationmachine.net/>. [Click on the format preferred on the left.]

2002; Last revised: 1 December 2008
Dr. Bonnie Duncan
bduncan@millersville.edu
1-717-871-2080
English Department
Millersville University
Millersville, PA 17551

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