This chapter is an especially important one. With the explosion of available online information that has emerged since Al Gore invented the internet [1] , many students enter college with the attitude that they will never set a single toe in any library that has a hard-surface floor and stacks of shelved books. Indeed, it is possible to write many college papers using only internet resources, and many professors embrace the internet by assigning papers that promote or demand its use. Modern libraries must and do scramble to keep up as well, subscribing to online journals and CD-ROMs so that students can work in virtual space and download to their desktops with a single click of the mouse.

So how do you address this issue of effectively using and documenting sources, whether internet or print resources? The answer lies in applying professional standards to your work, recognizing how your research and writing process inform the product you produce, understanding how the modern library is best used, and mastering the mechanics of citation. The issue of mechanics—citing your sources properly, especially on your references page—remains a challenge for many writers, and the question of exactly how to cite web sources makes things even murkier. With various citation styles available and URLs that are longer than the alphabet, what is a writer to do?

The material in this chapter will help you to address these issues and provide you with resources where you can track down more information. Whatever your writing process, even if you are in the habit of resorting to the "patch and pray" method, my aim is to help you approach the writing process professionally, begin to understand how to assess the quality of all of your sources, whether print- or web-based, and clarify the mechanics of citation. So press on, and recognize that your facility at using resources highly influences your reader’s perception of your work.

To discuss professionalism and writing, we should begin with the most obvious problem: plagiarism. Outright plagiarism is always a serious offense, and, when professors forgive it, it is usually because they see it as a terribly dumb and desperate act. In a composition class that I taught, I once had a foolish student plagiarize from someone in the same section (then he was surprised that I noticed—duh), and in the hallways I have heard students talk about "getting away with" blatant plagiarism on papers. Further, there are ample websites (I will not supply their URLs here, natch) where lazy students can download ready-made papers and turn them in for their classes. (Savvy professors can track down these papers readily, of course, perhaps by submitting a suspicious paper to http://turnitin.com/, [4] a website devoted to helping teachers check submitted papers for originality.)

However, as a writing tutor for 20 years I discussed this issue almost daily with students, and I am convinced that many students plagiarize "accidentally"—that is, they fail to cite information they took from a source because they quickly, if tentatively, assess that the information they chose resides in a "gray area," and thus it might not need to be cited. They reason, "Why bother if I’m unsure?", or "Why risk doing it poorly?" Further, students frequently oversimplify this issue by rationalizing that the information appeared in an encyclopedia or in several books and therefore it need not be cited. In one case, I had a student say to me, "If it’s on the internet, by definition, it’s common knowledge, and therefore I don’t have to cite it." Such thinking causes me pain.

What such writers must realize is that one’s use and citation of sources has to be both reflective and discerning. The quality and context of your sources matter just as much as their content, and you are obliged always to assess that quality and consider whether and how best to establish that context. Your readers—especially your professors—will naturally be assessing quality and context in the act of reading, and they will expect you to have done the same. When using web-based sources, the responsibility to cite your material conscientiously remains, and in fact your responsibility to assess the credibility of the information increases simply because the material did in fact appear on the web. Further, if you see in-text citation of sources as a final, merely trivial step to writing rather than as an integral part, you are bound to slip up somewhere in your citation practice or lose track of the relationship between your own ideas and those of your sources. I am always surprised at the number of students who sit down with me to review a "complete" paper draft, yet with no sources cited. "Oh, I do that last," they say, then during our tutorials we invariably encounter problems that can only be reconciled by a better handling of source material. Stated simply, using sources well in your paper is not a matter of mere mechanics; it is the art of blending source material within the context of a focused argument as you write.

Unfortunately, the norm for many students is that they spend hours unreflectively surfing the web with an overly broad research focus, or they quickly Xerox anything that looks relevant in the library, then, 24 or 12 hours before the deadline, they sit down and start tapping madly into the word processor, sometimes simply lifting whole paragraphs from their sources and hoping that it looks like their own work, loudly assuring themselves and their friends that they "work best under pressure." If this is your technique, you will find that it fails you miserably when it comes to writing a thesis or working on a lengthy writing project on the job. Writing a long research paper in a day is a bit like pulling an all-nighter on Christmas Eve to crochet a quilt—the end product looks hurried and flimsy, and you can be sure that you have left many loose ends and produced a lousy Christmas gift.

 

Especially if you are surfing the web, your research process should commence with a quality check of any sources you plan to use. Many writers begin badly in this area, simply typing, say, "genetics" into a search engine and getting a return of over 90,000 hits. The likely result is an arbitrary research process, yielding sources vastly varying in quality. The first step when writing a research paper should always be narrowing your focus and choosing quality sources to fit the circumstances.

To run a quality check on your sources, follow these guidelines:

• Begin by discerning the expected quality of resources in relation to the paper you are writing. Read carefully any material supplied by the professor regarding the assignment. Typically, you will be told if your paper should favor primary sources (original evidence provided by participants) or secondary sources (interpretations of primary sources by authors). Specific sources might be suggested to you, and parameters for using internet resources might also be discussed.
• Assess the author’s credibility and bias. This could be established by your finding out and providing efficient biographical information on the author, and interpreting the author’s agenda through the tone of the text, the kinds of examples provided, and the level of audience to whom the author is writing.
• Note whether the author has any professional affiliation, and how this affiliation connects to the author’s work. Especially with websites, where an organization might be considered the author, the question of affiliation and professional status becomes especially important. The most credible resources often have ties to professional organizations with standards for membership, for instance. The most credible web pages are often affiliated with a professional sponsoring organization. And we should expect different commentary on the same incident by, say, a chemical plant representative as opposed to a spokesperson from the Environmental Protection Agency.

• Assess the level of information and interpretation the source provides. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other information-based resources are perfectly good for attaining or verifying dates and facts, but keep in mind that the information provided may be viewed as elementary by your readers, and typically little if any authorial interpretation is provided in such sources.
• Carefully consider the sources cited by your sources. This not only gives you a potential reading list, it helps you determine the quality of your sources’ research. Are the cited sources primary or secondary? encyclopedia or journal articles? biased or objective?
• For both print and web resources, look for clear indicators of quality in both form and content. Are you using a cheaply produced brochure by an organization interested in self-promotion and fundraising, or a book published by a government agency or established press? Is the material written with grace and clarity, organized effectively, and professional in appearance, or is the writing style embarrassing, the organization haphazard, the text awash in typos?

• Note how current the information is, especially if the material comes from the web. In this regard, the internet is sometimes superior to the print medium, in that information might be published either exclusively or first on the web. However, also assess whether the source of information is outdated, or should be compared to information from a different time or a different medium.

A colleague of mine once told me a story that proves how small the academic world can be while underscoring the best reason to document sources: Doing so is likely to make you friends; failing to do so can only make you enemies. This colleague was asked to review a proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation, and was irate when he realized that an author of the proposal did not acknowledge my colleague’s work when he clearly should have. An investigation confirmed my colleague’s suspicions, which stung all the more because he had once actually nominated the author for an award. For my colleague, the author, and the National Science Foundation, this became an unpleasant situation all around, breeding distrust and embarrassment. A lot of time was wasted. All of this could have been avoided if the author had merely put his research into the appropriate context by properly acknowledging his sources. Instead, the author—whether intentionally or not—plagiarized, thus hurting other members of his proposal team as well.

When you write papers, you might be tempted to plagiarize to try to cover up the fact that almost all of your paper came directly from sources or that you relied heavily on the internet for your research. Your well-read professors will not be fooled by this tactic, though, and part of your job as a researcher and writer is to organize, assimilate, and recast your information in your own form. If you find yourself doing such things as using the same source for several paragraphs in a row or failing even to provide your own topic sentences for paragraphs, you are obviously not doing your job as a thinking writer. Do not fall back on the flimsy excuse that you might as well just copy it exactly as it appeared because you "like the way it was written." The context for your writing is different from the context of the original. The reason you use sources in the first place is to simplify and summarize information and weave it into the pattern of your own ideas, and your pattern of ideas will develop as you write and do your research.

Information that always must be cited—whether web-based or print-based—includes:

• Quotations, opinions, and predictions, whether directly quoted or paraphrased.
• Statistics derived by the original author.
• Visuals in the original.
• Another author’s theories.
• Case studies.
• Another author’s direct experimental methods or results.
• Another author’s specialized research procedures or findings.

If you use specific information of the type just mentioned, document it; otherwise you could be plagiarizing. Better safe than lazy. By citing the source of your information you point to an authority rather than ask your reader to trust your memory or what might appear to be your own idea. Even though you can recall a statistic or a description of a process, for example, citation of such information—if it came directly from a source—gives more credibility to your writing and underscores the accuracy, timeliness, and even the potential bias of your information. In short, be honest, smart, and safe.

In technical writing, integrating source material is a process of selection, extraction, and recontextualizing. Technical writing rarely relies on direct quotations, because the author’s exact wording is usually not as relevant as the data or information reported. Suppose you are writing a technical paper on mine safety, for example, and you encounter this material:

Since 1870, 121,000 mining deaths have occurred; 1.7 million lost-time injuries have been recorded since 1930. Historically, all of this has contributed to the public’s negative perception of mining safety and even helped to fuel the NIMBY mentality.

It is highly unlikely that you would quote these sentences directly, especially because some of the material is data and some is interpretation. The exact wording does not matter, but some of the material does, so your job is to extract only the relevant information, use it, and cite the source.

Similarly, there is no good reason to quote this sentence directly:

Acid mine drainage has been and continues to be a major problem generated by the mining of coal in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the world.

In this instance, the information is so general that it need not even be cited, but neither should the sentence itself just be plucked out and plopped into your paper. Ideally, the information from the above sentence would simply end up as part of a sentence of your own creation such as this one:

This paper explores the three chief reasons why acid mine drainage continues to be a major environmental problem in Pennsylvania.

In this example, note how the relevant information is extracted from the source, without the need for citation, and note how the writer creates new context for the information.

When working with sources, many students worry they are simply regurgitating ideas that others formulated. That is why it is important for you to develop your own assertions, organize your findings so that your own ideas are still the thrust of the paper, and take care not to rely too much on any one source, or your paper’s content might be controlled too heavily by that source.

In practical terms, some ways to develop and back up your assertions include:

• Blend sources with your assertions. Organize your sources before and as you write so that they blend, even within paragraphs. Your paper—both globally and at the paragraph level—should reveal relationships among your sources, and should also reveal the relationships between your own ideas and those of your sources.
• Write an original introduction and conclusion. As much as is practical, make the paper’s introduction and conclusion your own ideas or your own synthesis of the ideas inherent in your research. Use sources minimally in your introduction and conclusion.
• Open and close paragraphs with originality. In general, use the openings and closing of your paragraphs to reveal your work—"enclose" your sources among your assertions. At a minimum, create your own topic sentences and wrap-up sentences for paragraphs.
• Use transparent rhetorical strategies. When appropriate, outwardly practice such rhetorical strategies as analysis, synthesis, comparison, contrast, summary, description, definition, hierarchical structure, evaluation, hypothesis, generalization, classification, and even narration. Prove to your reader that you are thinking as you write.

Also, you must clarify where your own ideas end and the cited information begins. Part of your job is to help your reader draw the line between these two things, often by the way you create context for the cited information. A phrase such as "A 1979 study revealed that . . ." is an obvious announcement of citation to come. Another recommended technique is the insertion of the author’s name into the text to announce the beginning of your cited information. You may worry that you are not allowed to give the actual names of sources you have studied in the paper’s text, but just the opposite is true. In fact, the more respectable a source you cite, the more impressed your reader is likely to be with your material while reading. If you note that the source is the NASA Science website or an article by Stephen Jay Gould or a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal right in your text, you offer your readers immediate context without their having to guess or flip to the references page to look up the source.

What follows is an excerpt from a political science paper that clearly and admirably draws the line between writer and cited information:

The above political upheaval illuminates the reasons behind the growing Iranian hatred of foreign interference; as a result of this hatred, three enduring geopolitical patterns have evolved in Iran, as noted by John Limbert. First . . .

Note how the writer begins by redefining her previous paragraph’s topic (political upheaval), then connects this to Iran’s hatred of foreign interference, then suggests a causal relationship and ties her ideas into John Limbert’s analysis—thereby announcing that a synthesis of Limbert’s work is coming. This writer’s work also becomes more credible and meaningful because, right in the text, she announces the name of a person who is a recognized authority in the field. Even in this short excerpt, it is obvious that this writer is using proper citation and backing up her own assertions with confidence and style.

Writing a paragraph with the sources properly cited can seem a tricky task at first, but the process is straightforward enough, especially when we analyze an example. Writing a sound paragraph is really just a matter of thinking clearly about a topic you have researched and transferring that thinking to the page. To illustrate, a tidy sample paragraph follows, with the sources properly documented in the author-year system. Next, the genesis of the paragraph is analyzed.

The millions of species of plants and animals on the earth have a phenomenal influence on the human species. Not only do they provide a substantial amount of our food, they are of great value in medicine and science. Over 60 percent of the purchases we make at the pharmacy contain substances that are derived from wild organisms (Myers 2008). Studies of plants and animals have led to discoveries in virtually all of the sciences, from biology and chemistry to psychology and astronomy (Wilson 2001). Furthermore, plants and animals are vital to the maintenance of our ecosystem. Their diversity and balance directly control food webs, nutrient diversity, supplies of fresh water, climate consistency, and waste disposal (Eberly 1988). Finally, many species act as barometers of our environment. The salmon, for example, is extremely sensitive to changes in the condition of the water in which it lives. Any abnormality in population or behavior of fish usually indicates some type of chemical imbalance in the water. The same is true of butterflies and their responses to the environment within prominent agricultural areas. Clearly, the millions of species of plants and animals in the world are vital to the continued thriving of the human population.

Now let’s walk through the paragraph and its use of sources. The first two sentences assert the author’s personal view about the value of the world’s species (a view shaped by his research, no doubt), which he is about to back up by using three recent sources. Next, the author cites a journal article (Myers) from which he extracted a statistic ("over 60 percent of the purchases we make at the pharmacy"). Without this source cited, the reader might believe that the author estimated loosely or simply relied on his memory for the statistic. The next source (Wilson) is cited because the paper author borrowed a general claim from a textbook by Wilson. The author was at first not sure whether to cite the source, but he wisely decided that he should because he realized that he had in fact had Wilson’s book open to a particular page and referred to it as he wrote the sentence. The next source (Eberly) is cited because the author had browsed through a whole chapter of Eberly’s book in order to compose the list in the sentence, usually using Eberly’s exact section headings from the chapter as the list members. The final examples of the salmon and the butterfly were based directly on the author’s personal experience of working at a fish hatchery for a summer, so documenting sources was not an issue. The fact that the author finds a way to tie this experiential knowledge in with his research is testimony to the fact that he is thinking as he writes the paragraph. He blends his sources, but he does not allow them to do the thinking for him. More evidence of the author’s control over his material resides in his transparent mid-paragraph transition sentence (beginning with "Furthermore"), his labeling of species as "barometers" of the environment a few sentences later, and his closing sentence, which wraps up the paragraph’s ideas neatly by making an affirmative and confident statement that backs up his topic sentence and examples.

Not every paragraph should look exactly like this, of course, but every paragraph should be written with the same kind of conscientiousness about how, when, and why the sources are cited.

In the modern library, whose shelves could be wooden, metal, or electronic, we need to school ourselves in the best practices to ensure that we efficiently access the best material from these shelves. We do this by overcoming the attitude that the library is a foreign country, by rapidly understanding distinctions among resources, and by using search engines effectively.

Getting to Know Your Library

My colleagues and I lament a growing problem with the modern university library, which now houses both books and computer terminals: Students use the library computer to track down a perfect resource, find all the bibliographic information they need about it online, then have no idea how to find it on a particular shelf, and give up without actually ever tracking it down. The problem here is not in the electronic cataloguing system, which must be comprehensive to be useful, but in the individual user’s initiative. Put simply, to become a good researcher, there is no substitute for being physically present in the library and learning its layout.

To work in the modern library, follow these basic practices:

• Take a tour. Whether self-guided, human-led, or virtual, a tour curbs the fundamental confusion about where you are within a library, which can make all the difference when you are chasing down a particular source in a hurry. A simple tour will also expose you to the different forms and locations of library resources, such as help desks, shelves for current periodicals, reference shelves, stacks for less recent resources, and microfilm.
• Plan ahead. Especially when working on a sizeable project, it is unrealistic to expect that all the resources you need will be immediately available. You must give yourself time to physically track down resources, recall material that is checked out, request archived material, or deal with the inevitable limitations of resources that you find.
• Recognize how libraries work together. Especially at a large university, you encounter multiple, specialized libraries within one system, and you have access to interlibrary loan (allowing you to borrow books from other libraries). No library is or even tries to be a "one-stop shop."
• View the library webpages as a time-saving device. Beyond their obvious aid as a research tool, library webpages are typically set up to save you time. You can usually do such things as reserve books online, renew books online, and even suggest books for purchase or e-mail specific questions to a librarian.
• When you find a hard copy of a resource, browse the nearby shelves. Frequently, while standing among the library shelves, I have discovered some of the best resources simply by looking through the related books near the one I was originally seeking. Such serendipitous, productive discovery is a lot more likely to happen at the library shelves than online.
• Do not fear the human. When in doubt, ask a real person who is paid to help you.

Discerning Distinctions Among Resources

When choosing the best resources for a particular task, you improve and narrow your search by assessing source quality and establishing a good fit between the level of source information required and the circumstances for which you are writing. A good starting point is determining whether a resource is scholarly or popular, whether its material is more anecdotal or research-based, and whether the author’s tone is subjective or factual. When discerning which sources best fit the task at hand, keep in mind these guidelines:

• You can rapidly determine the quality and usefulness of a source without fully reading it. Consider such issues as its level of language use, its context (whether published as a single work or as part of a collection), and the sources that it cites. Popular material is often short, not technically oriented, and topical. Scholarly work tends to be longer and more structured, more technical, and concerned with adding to a body of academic work rather than just standing alone.
• The best academic resources are usually journals that are "peer-reviewed" or "refereed" (the two terms are used almost interchangeably). This means that the journal editor has had other authorities critique and approve articles that the journal publishes. Practices vary about how this review takes place, but such review affords a level of quality that other resources might not possess. If the journal is online, you can try to determine if it is peer-reviewed by reading its root pages, but the surest way is to find a print version of the journal and look at its "Information for Authors" page, typically appearing in the back or front of the journal.
• When seeking print journal articles, narrow your search by using abstracts and indexes available on your library shelves. This helps you find resources across disciplines, and abstracts and indexes provide a form of quality control by listing established journals.
• If a source is online, see if it is also available in print, and favor the print version.

Understanding Search Engines

Happily, the web is a good teacher of itself, so rather than provide lengthy material here on search engines, I offer just a few tips and some URLs for further information. A few oft overlooked fundamentals of search engines are worth special highlighting here:

• For a comprehensive search, do not rely on a single search engine, and understand that different search engines work differently. Some, for instance, first yield sites that are attempting to sell books, while others first yield sites of academic journals online.
• Learn to do advanced searches by clicking on a link such as "Search Tips" near the search box within a particular engine. Such tips tend to be transferable among search engines.
• Most search engines employ "Boolean logic" (for an excellent primer on Boolean logic, see "Basic Search Tips and Advanced Boolean Explained" [8] from Berkeley University) which means that you can use operators (such as "or," "not," "and," and the "+" and "-" sign) to narrow your search. Further, you can usually use quotation marks around a key phrase to indicate that you wish to view pages that include those words in that order.

Amidst the spinning electrons that we exploit nearly every time we do research, let us not forget the value of print resources available in most any college library. From style manuals that go well beyond the scope of this one to guidebooks published by professional organizations, an amazing number of print resources are available in libraries to help us track down definitive answers to questions and narrow our research focus. Below I list just a few of the best print resources available by category, along with their call numbers so you can easily track them down. Many of these resources are updated every few years, and most will reside on the references shelves in your library.

STYLE MANUALS provide stylistic guidelines and answers to matters of grammar and format.

PN171.D37L5 1993	Electronic Style: A Guide to Citing Electronic Information.
PN147.A28 1985	The MLA Style Manual.
BF76.7.A46	Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.
Z253.C5701	The Chicago Manual of Style.
PN147.M47 1983	The McGraw-Hill Style Manual.
LB2369.D8 1962	A Manual of Form for Theses and Term Reports.
PE1475.S25 1994	Helping Researchers Write—So Managers Can Understand.
PE1408.S772 1959	The Elements of Style.
T11.M56	Writing for Technical and Professional Journals.
T11.K34 1985	Elements of the Scientific Paper.
T11.M418 1982	How to Write and Publish Engineering Papers and Reports.
T11.E35	The Art of Technical Writing.
T11.D33 1988	How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper.
T11.S65 1977	Technical Report Writing.
QD85.A25 1986	The ACS Style Guide: A Manual for Authors and Editors.
PE1475.T53 1988	Effective Writing for Engineers, Managers, Scientists.

DICTIONARIES define words and describe how to use them.

PE1693.G3 1990	Acronyms, Initialisms, & Abbreviations Dictionary.
PE1680.M59	Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage.
PE1591.M37 1962	Roget’s International Thesaurus.
PE1680.R63 1957	The Word Finder.
Q123.M15 1983	McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms.
QA5.J32 1976	Mathematics Dictionary.

ENCYCLOPEDIAS provide general and specialized background information.

Q121.M3 1982	McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology.
QH540.4.M3 1980	McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Environmental Science.
AE5.E363 1990	Encyclopedia Britannica.

HANDBOOKS guide you to preliminary information and serve as reference tools.

TJ151.M371	Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers.
TK151.S8	Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers.
QA47.M315 27th	CRC Standard Mathematical Tables.
QD65.H301	CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.
T56 1971	Industrial Engineering Handbook.
TA151.S8	Standard Handbook for Civil Engineers.

ABSTRACTS AND INDEXES lead you to specific journal articles.

QD1.A51	Chemical Abstracts.
QA75.5.A25	ACM Guide to Computing Literature.
QA76.C5854	Computing Reviews.
G1.G36	Geo Abstracts.
TD180.P6	Pollution Abstracts.
HD9540.5.E55	Energy Index.
Z5322.E2E53	Environmental Index.
QA1.M76	Mathematical Reviews.
QA276.A1 C87	Current Index to Statistics.
TN1.A58	Metallurgical Abstracts.

BUSINESS SOURCES describe industries, corporations, and products.

T12.T6Q	Thomas Register of American Manufacturers.
HC107.P4A282	Harris Pennsylvania Industrial Directory.

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS lead you to papers given at conferences.

Z7401.I54	Index to Scientific and Technical Proceedings.
Z7409.D56	Directory of Published Proceedings.

BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES give general information about scientists.

Q141.A47	American Men and Women of Science.
Q141.D5 1981	Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
T39.W5	Who’s Who in Technology Today.

GUIDES TO THE LITERATURE list some of the best resources in the field.

QA41.7.S3	Using the Mathematical Literature, a Practical Guide.
Z7551.B86	How to Find Out About Statistics.
QA76.C6501	Computing Information Directory.

 

TECHNICAL REPORTS give results of ongoing governmental research.

Z7913.U2	Government Reports Announcement and Index.
Z1223.A18	Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications.

 

The author-year system of documentation is used more on the undergraduate level than the graduate. Fields that have ties to the liberal arts, such as geography, human development, and political science, tend to favor the author-year system.

Your basic job when using this system is to indicate right in the text—in parentheses—the author(s) and year of publication of the reference you are citing. Since the citation becomes part of your sentence, you delay the appropriate punctuation until after the parentheses:

In recent decades, anthropogenic activities such as deforestation, desertification, and urbanization have significantly altered the land surface (Nicholson 2007).

Many writers identify the source as soon as they begin the reference, including the author’s name directly in the text and supplying only the year in parentheses:

Furlong et al. (2001) estimate that the first Mt. Erebus eruption . . .

If you use two or more articles written by the same author(s) in the same year, you distinguish between the documents in your text and on your references page by using an "a,b,c" system, providing an identifying letter after the year:

Toon (1989a) found evidence of . . .

When citing web-based sources in your text, you will often encounter sources with no author listed. Handle these cases just as you would when citing print sources—that is, if no author’s name is given in the original, offer the title of the web page, or the publication’s title, or the publisher’s name. If such a title is lengthy enough to be awkward, offer a clear shortened form of the title, with the goal of making it easy for us to find the source on the references page. In the following example, a document authored by a governmental agency is identified by a shortened form of its name:

Coordinated measurements planned in the framework of the original program should help to explain the apparent discrepancies in the data (PRIMO document, 1989).

Other In-Text Citation Practices

Slight but important mechanical differences exist among in-text citation practices, in particular when you are trying to conform to a specific style, such as MLA (Modern Language Association) or APA (American Psychological Association). For example, MLA style requires you to provide the page number of your citation in-text, but not the year, while APA style asks you to place a comma between author and year. Please feel welcome to explore all of these nuances for yourself if you wish, and recognize that some professors will insist that you conform to a particular style. When professors do not dictate a particular style, they will usually simply expect you to use the author-year or number system with consistency throughout the paper.

Remember, too, that journals within your field have already made informed decisions about which in-text citation practices they use. To settle on citation particulars, many writers model a journal in their field—mandatory, of course, if you submit material to a journal hoping for publication.

Generally, the number system is favored in fields where you typically report experimental field or lab work. Technical fields such as materials science, aerospace engineering, and chemistry tend to favor the number system.

When you use the number system, your responsibility is to indicate in your text—either in parentheses or brackets—a number that corresponds to a source on your references page. The first source you cite in your text receives the number 1, the second number 2, and so on. If you repeat a reference to a source later in the text, it retains its original number—thus, all references to source number 4 receive a 4 after them in parentheses or brackets. You delay the appropriate punctuation until after the parentheses or brackets:

If the load on the thrust bearing can be decreased by some means, the life of the turbodrill can be significantly increased (1).

Many authors prefer to identify the source at the beginning of the reference, perhaps including the author’s name directly in the text:

Gould et al. (5) found a clear relation between. . .

The number system is especially handy for citing equations, because you can simply insert the citation number logically as you introduce the equation to avoid confusion with any other numbers:

The line’s slope is used in the following equation (7) to calculate. . .

Other In-Text Citation Practices

Slight but important mechanical differences exist among in-text citation practices, in particular when you are trying to conform to a specific style, such as MLA (Modern Language Association) or APA (American Psychological Association). For example, MLA style requires you to provide the page number of your citation in-text, but not the year, while APA style asks you to place a comma between author and year. Please feel welcome to explore all of these nuances for yourself if you wish, and recognize that some professors will insist that you conform to a particular style. When professors do not dictate a particular style, they will usually simply expect you to use the author-year or number system with consistency throughout the paper.

Remember, too, that journals within you field have already made informed decisions about which in-text citation practices they use. To settle on citation particulars, many writers model a journal in their field—mandatory, of course, if you submit material to a journal hoping for publication.

Following in-text citation of sources, of course, you are obliged to provide bibliographic information about your sources on a references page. Composing a references page is, for many writers, a painful process, particularly if they handled their references sloppily at the research stage. You simplify your task greatly by recording complete bibliographic information of your cited sources as you research, thus building your references page as you go. Some students wisely use notecards to keep track of their references, while others have a less formal system. As I cite sources in-text, I simply keep adding the complete bibliographic information to my references page right in my Word file for the paper; thus my references page is finished as soon as the last paragraph is.

As with in-text citation, reference page styles vary from one publication to another, but the fundamentals can still be expressed by the two simple categories of the author-year system and the number system. You could, of course, choose any respected magazine or journal in your field as a model for your references page and use it consistently, and this is often the easiest and most logical path to take.

Mechanics of the Author-Year System References Page

Using the author-year system, on your references page you typically provide the following information in the following order:

• The names and initials of all authors, beginning with the last name of the first author listed, followed by a comma.
• Year of publication, followed by a colon.
• Title of the document or article being cited, with the key words capitalized. Quotation marks could be used around article titles.
• Title of book, magazine, or journal, underlined or italicized, with journal titles abbreviated, followed by a period.
• Publication information—for a book or privately published document, provide the publisher’s name and location, then the total number of pages, separated by commas; for a journal or magazine, provide the volume number in boldface, then a comma, then the page numbers of the article being cited.
• The entire URL (if the source is a website), usually enclosed in brackets, followed by a period. Then provide either the last date the page was updated or the date that you accessed it, followed by a period. When citing a web document, typical bibliographic details, such as the page’s author, will often be unavailable. Therefore, skip the steps above as needed, but always provide the URL.

At times, some of the above information will be unavailable or sketchy, especially in relation to company brochures, maps, non-professional publications, and web sources. It is acceptable to omit unavailable information, of course, but when less information is available you might provide a short narrative description of a particular source.

In the author-year system, your references are listed on a separate references page in alphabetical order, using the last names of the authors, article title (if no author), or publisher name. The type should be double-spaced, lines should not be skipped between each reference, and a hanging indent of five spaces should be used after the first line of each reference. Always include the word "References," boldfaced, in the center at the top of the page.

Click here to download a pdf of a sample References page using the author-year system. [12]

Following in-text citation of sources, of course, you are obliged to provide bibliographic information about your sources on a references page. Composing a references page is, for many writers, a painful process, particularly if they handled their references sloppily at the research stage. You simplify your task greatly by recording complete bibliographic information of your cited sources as you research, thus building your references page as you go. Some students wisely use notecards to keep track of their references, while others have a less formal system. As I cite sources in-text, I simply keep adding the complete bibliographic information to my references page right in my Word file for the paper; thus my references page is finished as soon as the last paragraph is.

As with in-text citation, reference page styles vary from one publication to another, but the fundamentals can still be expressed by the two simple categories of the author-year system and the number system. You could, of course, choose any respected magazine or journal in your field as a model for your references page and use it consistently, and this is often the easiest and most logical path to take.

Mechanics of the Number System References Page

Using the number system, on your references page you typically provide the following information in the following order:

• The number of the reference, followed by a period.
• The first initials and last names of all authors, followed by a comma.
• Title of the article enclosed in quotation marks, followed by a comma.
• Title of book, magazine, or journal, underlined or italicized, with journal titles typically abbreviated, followed by a period.
• Volume numbers or editors—if citing a journal or magazine, provide the volume number in boldface, followed by the issue number in brackets; if citing a book with editors or volume numbers, provide the names of the editors or the volume numbers.
• Publication information—for a book or privately published document, provide the relevant page numbers, then the publisher’s name and location (all separated by commas), then the year in parentheses, followed by a period; for a journal or magazine, provide the relevant page numbers of the article being cited, then the year in parentheses, followed by a period.
• The entire URL (if the source is a website), usually enclosed in brackets, followed by a period. Then provide either the last date the page was updated or the date that you accessed it, followed by a period. When citing a web document, typical bibliographic details, such as the page’s author, will often be unavailable. Therefore, skip the steps above as needed, but always provide the URL.

At times, some of the above information will be unavailable or sketchy, especially in relation to company brochures, maps, non-professional publications, and web sources. It is acceptable to omit unavailable information, of course, but when less information is available you might provide a short narrative description of a source for clarity.

In the number system, your references are listed on a separate references page in the order in which they were cited by first appearance in your text, and they are numbered accordingly. Each source is, of course, simply listed once, even though it may have been referred to in the text numerous times. The type should be double-spaced, lines should not be skipped between each reference, and a hanging indent of five spaces should be used after the first line of each reference. Always include the word "References," boldfaced, in the center at the top of the page.

Click here to download a pdf of a sample References page using the number system. [13]

Q: Suppose I can’t determine the author of a source, should I just cite "Anonymous"?
A: This is an outmoded practice. If no author is listed but an affiliated organization is given, consider the name of that organization to be the source, both in-text and on the references page.

Q: What if I can’t find either author or year? May I cite the source in-text just by its title?
A: Typically, yes. Supply the title (or a shortened form of it) in-text in quotation marks, then give fuller bibliographic information on the references page.

Q: When citing web sources, should I give the URL within the text itself?
A: No—this is non-standard and, frankly, comes off as pretty lame. Provide the URL on the references page, but handle the in-text citation as you would any other, providing author-year or source number. Unless the nature of the source as being web-based is highly relevant to context, the reader in the act of reading should be virtually unaware (no pun intended) that you are using a web source. Never attempt an in-text citation with something as informal and downright silly as "According to the internet . . ."

Q: Suppose a web page has nothing but a title on it, and I have no idea who authored it?
A: Then you would provide only that information available, in particular the URL and the date accessed, on your references page. As always, be sure to carefully assess the page’s quality and credibility too.

Q: What about information obtained verbally from a credible source?
A: In-text, handle the citation as you normally would, giving author-year or source number; on the references page, follow the person’s name with his or her title or affiliation (you could even supply the party’s mailing address), then the words "personal communication."

Q: What if I’m citing e-mail, or a newsgroup, or a gopher site, or a CD-ROM? How do I handle this on the references page?
A: For such specialized concerns, you need to consult a more specific style guide. Online, I can recommend online! a reference guide to using internet sources. [15]

Q: I’m trying to return to a page I visited last week, and I get error messages. How do I find it?
A: After rechecking your typing, try truncating a portion of the URL. Cutting off the end of the address frequently takes you back to the page’s author and you can try relocating from there. Of course, the page might indeed be gone, entirely eliminated from cyberspace.

Q: How important is a small detail such as punctuation on my references page?
A: Consistency within your document is what matters. Professors rarely deduct points over such small issues, but they do expect you to pay close attention to them and be consistent in your practices.

Q: Suppose I’m citing an author who cited someone else? Do I cite the original author or just the one I read?
A: You should only formally cite the author that you actually read, although a narrative mention of the other source within an in-text sentence is often appropriate. For example: "Kunkle (2001) reports that a 1998 study by Edmund Eberly revealed . . ." Of course, if time permits and the circumstances suggest you should, you might try to track down the original source and interpret it for yourself.

Q: Are footnotes "in" or "out"?
A: They’re definitely "out." Try to avoid them. Journals rarely use them, preferring an endnotes page with explanatory notes at the end of the text. Even this practice is rare except in scholarly works, where the author chooses to offer explanatory side discussions.

Q: What’s the difference between a references page and a bibliography?
A: A references page contains only those references that were directly cited in the text. A bibliography page is more of a reading list—it contains references referred to in the text plus the chief publications that you consulted in a general way. Some people—even some professors—use the two terms loosely and interchangeably, but journals tend to follow the distinction I just provided.

Q: What if I can’t find a source in the library, but the computer tells me it’s on the shelves?
A: Ask a librarian (this answer applies to questions I haven’t listed here as well). My experience is that most librarians are terribly helpful and kind to serious, respectful students.

Q: I’m old-fashioned and I still believe in books, so can you recommend some print resources to answer specific questions about citing web sources?
A: Good for you. I highly recommend Electronic Style: A Guide to Citing Electronic Information [16], by Xia Li and Nancy B. Crane. Also, the most modern library editions of major style guides (The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing [17]; The Chicago Manual of Style [18]) have thorough information and discussion on citing web sources.