Citations
| Type | Team Size | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Me, Myself and I | Group Collaboration | The Academic System | Software | 1 | 2-10 | 11-30 | 30+ |
What, Why & When
We all stand on the shoulders of giants. New science builds on what happened before, no matter how innovative the research may be. Consequently, all scientists need to quote the previous work that their reasoning and context is based upon. 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. Moreover, your statements become more credible if you can show that someone else has had similar results.
Citations and references need to be used in all your academic works, whether these are essays, term papers, presentations, or your final thesis. Whenever you quote or paraphrase from another person’s text, speech, etc. you must credit your source.
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
Citing allows you to show that you know the relevant literature, provides the source for the reader in case they are interested in it and, last but not least, protects you from accusation of plagiarism. You can either quote another author directly or paraphrase / summarize their ideas. Quotations can be helpful if the exact wording is important, but be careful not to use too many. In both cases you need to add the correct in-text citation or footnote and add the source to your bibliography at the end of your text. 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 for their preferred style).
There are two prominent ways of referencing you can use within your text:
In-Text-Citation
This first method has gained more popularity in the last years, especially in international contexts, but also in Germany. By using this method, the reader can keep his attention on the main text without having to skip to the bottom of the page for references. Here, a short reference in brackets is placed at the end of the respective sentence or paragraph, usually in front of any punctuation marks.
- (Surname Year, Page) → (Copeland 1997, p. 132)
- (Surname Title, Page) → (Copeland Money, p. 132)
Footnotes
Using footnotes for any references is especially common in the traditional humanities. They are numbered and placed at the bottom of the page which is useful if you want to keep your text neat and easy to read. Creating a footnote is quite easy, most writing programmes do it for you.
- 1Copeland 1997, p. 132.
- 2Miller 2003, p. 45.
→ Make sure to end every footnote with a full stop!
Bibliography
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. Mind that the different citation styles have distinct rules on when to use italics, Capitalization and punctuation marks. You can find detailed instructions in the sources listed below, but here are some examples:
MLA Style
Essay in a collection:
- Last Name, First 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.
APA Style
Monography:
- Last Name, Initials. (year). Title: Subtitle. Publisher.
- Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Books.
Chicago Style
Website:
- Author Last Name, First Name. “Page Title.” Website Name. Month Day, Year. URL.
- Scribbr. “Chicago Style Citation.” Accessed June 16, 2020. https://www.scribbr.com/category/chicago-style/.
Reference Managers
Softwares like Citavi, Mendeley, EndNote or Zotero can help you manage your references and create a bibliography for you. Some can be used freely and some require payment. If you write term papers, theses or even journal articles, such reference managers are a necessity. You need to invest a little bit of time to set them up and get used to the work flow, but after that they will really save you a lot of time. You can check if your library offers introductory courses. There are also websites that can generate citations for you, such as Skribbr, but make sure to double-check whether everything is correct.
Links & Further reading
- 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
The author of this entry is Katharina Kirn.
