Citing Electronic Sources
"Cite Your Sites" first popped into mind. Cute. Dumb SEO. Clever wordplay. All of the above. This proposed title is a nice play on rhyming words and the cliché "set your sights," but it would confuse search engines and not help people looking for information on the title used.
Paula Offutt's comment about the lame Anderson Plagiarism Apology prompted this post. Anderson's lame claim was that plagiarism in his recent book resulted from an inability to find a way to cite electronic sources. Such information is available in any style manual. Finding the citation styles online for free is another matter. Presumably Anderson can afford to own current copies of all style guides. Where was the publisher's editor in all this? What about a fact checker? It is difficult to check facts with no sources cited.
If you don't understand about citing sources at all, read the information on the Long Island University (C.W. Post Campus) Library web page on Citations. I particularly like:
# APA: psychology, education, and other social sciences.
# MLA: literature, arts, and humanities.
# AMA: medicine, health, and biological sciences.
# Turabian: designed for college students to use with all subjects.
# Chicago: used with all subjects in the 'real world' by books, magazines, newspapers, and other non-scholarly publications.
This all reminds me to write on Site vs. Cite vs. Sight.
Paula Offutt's comment about the lame Anderson Plagiarism Apology prompted this post. Anderson's lame claim was that plagiarism in his recent book resulted from an inability to find a way to cite electronic sources. Such information is available in any style manual. Finding the citation styles online for free is another matter. Presumably Anderson can afford to own current copies of all style guides. Where was the publisher's editor in all this? What about a fact checker? It is difficult to check facts with no sources cited.
If you don't understand about citing sources at all, read the information on the Long Island University (C.W. Post Campus) Library web page on Citations. I particularly like:
Use this rule of thumb: If you knew a piece of information before you started doing research, generally you do not need to credit it. You also do not need to cite well-known facts, such as dates, which can be found in many encyclopedias. All other information such as quotations, statistics, and ideas should always be cited in your papers.Advice on which style to use, Citation Style for Research Papers, also applies to nonacademic articles and books:
# APA: psychology, education, and other social sciences.
# MLA: literature, arts, and humanities.
# AMA: medicine, health, and biological sciences.
# Turabian: designed for college students to use with all subjects.
# Chicago: used with all subjects in the 'real world' by books, magazines, newspapers, and other non-scholarly publications.
This all reminds me to write on Site vs. Cite vs. Sight.
Labels: nonfiction, reference, writing
posted by Georganna Hancock M.S. | 9:25 AM
2 Comments:
I generally have found that English Teachers use MLA, but I have seen some use APA. Based on your list here (awesome, btw, thank you), Education is APA, literature is MLA. What is that official standard for literature education?
David, the type of writing (or the publisher) determines the style manual to follow. If you're writing an article about literature for an ed journal, use the APA (or the AP, if more appropriate). It is nonfiction writing.
"Literature" in this sense generally refers to fiction, to which the MLA applies.
Nothing is "official," however.
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