Citation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the research concept that acknowledges use of another's ideas. For other uses, see
Citation (disambiguation).
"Cite" redirects here. For the HTML element <cite>, see
HTML element § cite.
For Wikipedia's citation guideline, see
Wikipedia:Citing sources. For Wikipedia's citation templates, see
Wikipedia:Citation templates.
"Referencing" redirects here. For other uses, see
Reference.
Broadly, a
citation is a
reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears. Generally the combination of both the in-body citation and the bibliographic entry constitutes what is commonly thought of as a citation (whereas bibliographic entries by themselves are not). References to single, machine-readable assertions in electronic scientific articles are known as nanopublications, a form of
microattribution.
Citation has several important purposes: to uphold
intellectual honesty (or avoiding
plagiarism),
[1] to attribute prior or unoriginal work and ideas to the correct sources, to allow the reader to determine independently whether the referenced material supports the author's argument in the claimed way, and to help the reader gauge the strength and validity of the material the author has used.
[2]
The forms of citations generally subscribe to one of the generally accepted citations systems, such as the Oxford,
[3] Harvard, MLA, American Sociological Association (ASA), American Psychological Association (APA), and other citations systems, as their syntactic conventions are widely known and easily interpreted by readers. Each of these citation systems has its respective advantages and disadvantages relative to the trade-offs of being informative (but not too disruptive) and thus are chosen relative to the needs of the type of publication being crafted. Editors often specify the citation system to use.
Bibliographies, and other list-like compilations of references, are generally not considered citations because they do not fulfil the true spirit of the term: deliberate acknowledgement by other authors of the priority of one's ideas.
[4]
Contents
Concepts
Content
Citation content can vary depending on the type of source and may include:
- Book: author(s), book title, publisher, date of publication, and page number(s) if appropriate.[6][7]
- Journal: author(s), article title, journal title, date of publication, and page number(s).
- Newspaper: author(s), article title, name of newspaper, section title and page number(s) if desired, date of publication.
- Web site: author(s), 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).[8]
- Poem: spaced slashes are normally used to indicate separate lines of a poem, and parenthetical citations usually include the line number(s). For example: "For I must love because I live / And life in me is what you give." (Brennan, lines 15–16).[8]
- Interview: name of interviewer, interview descriptor (ex. personal interview) and date of interview.
Unique identifiers
Along with
information such as author(s), date of
publication,
title and
page numbers, citations may also include
unique identifiers depending on the type of work being referred to.
Systems
Broadly speaking, there are two types of citation systems (the
Vancouver system and
parenthetical referencing).
[9] However, the
Council of Science Editors (CSE) adds a third, the
citation-name system.[10]