Citations
| Type | Team Size | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collaborative Tools | Software | Personal Skills | Productivity Tools | 1 | 2-10 | 11-30 | 30+ |
What, Why & When
Why: Using correct citation is crucial for academic writing. Whenever you research a topic, you will read other people’s books and articles and use the information found there for your own interpretation of the subject. Therefore you need to make sure to respect other’s intellectual property and do not violate copyright laws. Moreover, your statements become more credible if you can show that someone else has had similar results.
When: Citations and references need to be used whenever you quote or paraphrase from another person’s text, speech or medium, want to hint at a certain publication or passage, and when you have taken information from another text.
Goal(s)
- Make the sources we used for our own work visible and trackable, and our statements verifiable.
- Give credit to the original author or creator of a text.
Getting started
- One of the difficulties of correct citation is that there are innumerable ways of doing it. Nearly every academic discipline and country has their own preference. The most important aspect here is that you stay consistent and do not mix several methods within one text (you can always ask your lecturers if they have a preferred style).
- There are two prominent ways of referencing you can use within your text: in-text-citation and footnotes. The first method is getting more popular, especially in international contexts. A short reference in brackets, usually (surname year, page)→(Copeland 1997, p. 132), is placed at the end of the respective sentence or paragraph.
- At the end of your paper you need to compile all of your cited sources in a bibliography. This list should be ordered alphabetically using the authors’ surnames. Here you give the full bibliographic information of your source containing at least author, title, year and place of publication.
- In the bibliography we differentiate between monographies, journal articles, articles within anthologies, websites etc. Each of these categories has to be referenced differently. You can find detailed instructions in the sources listed below. Here is an example of how to cite an essay in a book collection using the MLA Style:
Surname, Name. "Title." Title of collection, editor(s), publisher, year, page(s))
Copeland, Edward. “Money.” The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. 131-48.
Tip: Software like Citavi can help you manage your references and create a bibliography for you.
Links & Further reading
- citavi https://www.citavi.com/de
- MLA Style (Modern Language Association) - mostly for humanities https://www.mla.org/
- APA Style (American Psychological Association) - preferred for scientific papers https://apastyle.apa.org/
- Chicago Style - for social sciences https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html
