These are answers to questions I have been asked about citation following the library tutorial. Please feel free to ask more questions below and I will include answers here.
1a) What counts as an online source?
- online primary sources (through reputable sites like Internet Medieval Sourcebook)
- online journal articles
- online books (eg. via the library)
- online images (make sure you understand what they are/where & when they come from)
- Wikipedia
- any secondary sources that are not peer reviewed (blogs, newspaper opinion, documentaries)
- in fact, the peer review criterion also applies to secondary sources in print!
- This is called secondary citation. In general I am not a fan. Where possible I expect you to go back to the original source. However, when absolutely necessary:
- In your text indicate that you are making reference to an author whose work you haven't read, for example: Rodinelli, cited in Potts, describes the stages of a project... .1Then in your footnote, provide the details of the book you actually read (i.e. Potts). This reference should also then be listed in your bibliography.This advice comes from the Cardiff University Information Literacy Resource Book
[Editor's note: updates follow...]
4) Your bibliography should have separate subheadings for primary and secondary sources. Sort alphabetically within each section.
5) How do I reference a primary source document that I found online in the Medieval sourcebook (which was apparently taken out of a book). Do I reference it as an online source? If so, how to show that it's a primary source/ that it was originally printed in a book?
- Solve this dilemma with a reference format which acknowledges both the print and online formats of the source. Begin with the print details, and then indicate the URL and access date where/when you found it online, like so:
- Footnote:
Alcuin Blamires, The case for women in medieval culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) available: <http://hdl.handle.net.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/2027/heb.04182.0001.001> [accessed 22 April 2012], p. 232. - Bibliography:
Blamires, Alcuin, The case for women in medieval culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) <http://hdl.handle.net.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/2027/heb.04182.0001.001> [accessed 22 April 2012]
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10 comments:
Hi all,
Just alerting you to the queries page where I have added some new information about using Word. Students in some of my classes needed advice on how to insert footnotes, etc., and it may also be useful to you!
Matthew asked me how to cite sources for illustrations according to MHRA style. The style guide is a little vague, but suggests that you should mention the illustration in the text by saying, for example:
"In figure 1..."
If you do this, you can insert a footnote at the end of the sentence which contains the citation for the image's source.
The image should also have a caption. Captions should contain the:
figure number
image title
and a brief statement of source, such as:
Figure 1. Saladin at Hattin. Reprinted from Allen & Amt (eds), The Crusades: A Reader, p. 35.
And make sure the full details are in the related footnote and bibliography.
Incidentally, someone in another tute asked me about the difference between Bibliography and Reference list. I essentially use these words interchangably, but in some subjects they enforce the following distinction:
Reference List: only sources you actually used and cited in your essay.
Bibliography: all sources you read while researching the essay, even if you didn't use or cite them.
Personally, I've always considered the latter kind of a cheat's version, because you can pad it out and make it look more impressive than the research for the actual essay writing deserves. I promote the idea of citing what you have used to form your ideas in footnotes, even when they may not have been the direct source of a given point, but more a general influence. You can even briefly indicate this in the footnote, with comments like: "This general argument echoes the ideas of ..." or whatever. Then you have shown in the text what and why you thought it was relevant, and add it to the 'reference list' with a clear conscience.
Hi Kathleen,
In regards to referencing, I have multiple books by the same author. When doing subsequent referencing of one of those sources how do show that the information came from a particular work of the author?
Also another quick query, if in a secondary source it quotes a primary source and we wish to make use of that, do we just reference the secondary source?
When you're referencing multiple books by the same author and using footnotes, you always:
1) give all the publication details the first time you use each source.
2) for repeat citations, give surname and abbreviated title to distinguish them, except when the references are sequential and unambiguous (in which case 'Ibid.' is permissable).
Example footnotes:
1. Michael Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p.57.
2. Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p.221.
3. Clanchy, Abelard, p.10.
4. Ibid., p.45.
5. Clanchy, From Memory, p.150.
Example bibliography:
Clanchy, Michael, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
Clanchy, Michael, From Memory to Written Record, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
(The books by the same person are ordered by title...)
On the matter of quoting primary sources in secondary sources, please cite them so that I can recognise you have used primary material, otherwise I can't credit you for your efforts!
If it's just a sentence that another historian has used, you need to cite it in the form of 'secondary citation', explained above.
If it is a larger extract reproduced in another source, for example with a title or heading, I recommend treating it as if you were citing a chapter in a book, where the "chapter" author and title relate to the primary source.
It's particularly advisable, even if all your primary sources come from one printed collection, to list them as separate items in the 'primary source' section of your bibliography, so that I can see at a glance how many sources you have looked at.
Is that clear?
I've had a query about citing Black Death primary sources in the reader. This is a bit of an unusual situation because those final few primary sources in the reader have apparently been used in this unit for so many years that no one remembers the original publication details! (Whoops!) In this case, cite it using the format for a book chapter or section, where the "chapter" author and details relate to the primary text, and the "book" title and details relate to the reader itself. That's as close as you can get in this instance to the correct format.
Thank you for that :) It did help.
For material on DVD:
If it's a film, the reference should include, as a minimum, title, director, distributor, date, and format, e.g.:
The Grapes of Wrath, dir. by John Ford (20th Century Fox, 1940) [on DVD].
If it has a serial/product/recording number, it goes in the backets between the distributor and the year.
If it's a book or similar material published on DVD/CD-ROM, cite it as a normal book (or similar) and add "[on DVD]" or "[on CD]" after the round brackets, as above, and before any page reference.
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