AstrologyNotes Astrological Knowledge Base


Help:Cite Sources

From AstrologyNotes

There are two types of references:

  • Citations attached to specific facts in the article, which should be documented in footnotes
  • References to longer works which provide general background information or more detail, which are listed in a special section at the end of the article.

Contents

What are references good for?

  • Giving credit to a source for providing useful information.
  • Providing more information to curious readers.
  • Convincing skeptical readers that the article is accurate.
  • Helping other editors quickly verify facts.
  • Preventing and resolving editorial disputes.
  • Establishing general credibility for AstrologyNotes.
  • Avoiding claims of plagiarism or intellectual dishonesty.
  • Avoiding the impression that you are making stuff up.

Citing AstrologyNotes

Within AstrologyNotes, reference another AstrologyNotes article simply by surrounding its name with two square braces, for example, [[Astrology]]. If this does not look good, use a renaming reference, for example, [[Astrology|basics of astrology]].

When citing an AstrologyNotes article in another publication or website you can use Special:Cite to create a citation reference.

Citing Wikipedia

When citing an article from Wikipedia, you can use their tool for citations. Simply type the article name in the box and click the button, it will produce the citation for you.

When you add content

If you add information to an article which you gleaned from a specific external source, please at least write a quick note about where you got your information. If you can properly format your citation, that's great! If not, others can re-format it for you, as long as you provide all the information necessary to find the original source. Remember that some people will actually want to access the source, so try to make that as easy for them as you can.

If you are writing from your own knowledge, then you should know enough to identify good references that the reader can consult on the subject—you will not be around forever to answer questions. Do whatever you can to help readers and other editors.

The need for citations is especially important when writing about the opinions held on a particular issue. Avoid phrases like, "Some people say..." Instead, find a specific person or group who holds that opinion, mention them by name, and give a citation to some place where they can be seen or heard expressing that opinion. If appropriate, you might even give a short quote. Short quotes from published works such as books and websites do not violate any copyright laws under the "fair use" clause if properly cited.

How to cite

General references should be collected at the end of the article under a ==References== heading. The most important thing is to enter the complete reference information. Details like formatting can be dealt with later, but it is sometimes difficult for others to track down your sources.

When needed, the references for specific statements in the text can be indicated by the parenthetical or footnote styles described below. See below.

Citations in the text and at the end

At the end of an article, under a ==References== heading, list the complete reference information as a bulleted (*) list (not numbered), with one line per reference work.

If there is a separate section under the ==External links== heading, it should come after the ==References== section. A ==See also== section, which is for links to related AstrologyNotes articles as opposed to external works, should go before the ==References== section.

In addition to listing a reference at the end, you may choose to embed a pointer to a particular reference within the article text. To do this, cite references parenthetically as "(Author-Last-Name, Year)". Use the original publication year for a re-published work. If the cited information is not easy to find with just that information (for example, it is a poorly indexed topic in a large book), add chapters ("chap. 3") or pages ("p. 15" or "pp. 12–23") after the year (separating the two with a comma). When a reference is used as a noun, put the year in parentheses, for example "Milton (1653) says..." For two authors, use (Author1 & Author2, year); for more authors, use (Author1 et al., Year).

If the topic has few references and the material is truly uncontroversial, in-text citations are perhaps less important. However, in-text references can be very useful if there is a long list of references and it is not clear which one the reader should consult for more information on a specific topic. In-text citations can also be extremely useful if there is doubt or disagreement on some point; the text can claim that a report stated something, and then you can reference that report. In particular, articles that involve strong opposing viewpoints may need to have many in-text citations to justify many of their statements.

An example citation style

If you already use a particular citation style, especially the preferred style by scholars in a field related to the article you are editing, please use the citation style of your choice. However, if you cannot decide on what style to use or if you do not know what information to include, an example style based on the APA style is given below. In APA style, a widely accepted format for writing research papers, the references are listed in alphabetical order by author, and by year for identical authors.

Books

  • Lincoln, Abraham; Grant, U. S.; & Davis, Jefferson (1861). Resolving Family Differences Peacefully (3rd ed.). Gettysburg: Printing Press. ISBN 0-12-345678-9.

For an edited book, put "(Ed.)" or "(Eds.)" in parentheses after the last author, before the date. The ISBN (which is wikified automatically) is optional.

For a specific article or chapter in an edited book, use:

  • Pooh, Winnie T. & Robin, Christopher (1926). Modern techniques in heffalump capture. In A. A. Milne (Ed.), The Karma of Kanga, pp. 23–47. Hundred Acre Wood: Wol Press.

A good guideline is to list author names as they are written in the original article/book, without using any abbreviations. The APA guidelines recommend abbreviating first names to initial letters instead, but since AstrologyNotes has no shortage of space, you need not abbreviate names. Indeed, there are good reasons to include the full names of authors; such information makes it much easier to find the cited work, and it also makes it possible to find other related information by the same author.

If AstrologyNotes has a page for the book, make the book title a link to it, but retain the full reference (for example, for printing). If the authors are notable (as above) and have not already been linked to from the article, then make their names link to their pages. It is also occasionally relevant to link a publisher, place of publication, etc.

Electronic equivalents

As service providers begin making books available online it will become increasingly useful to cite them in the encyclopedia. Eventually we can begin linking all book citations to their electronic equivalents. Here is an example citation for Google Print:

Amazon's search inside the book feature provides less data to non-registered users but is still quite useful. Consider:

Journal articles

Journal articles are formatted much as a chapter in a book would be, for example:

  • Brandybuck, Meriadoc (1955). "Herb-lore of the Shire". Journal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry 10 (2), 234–351.

Note that the numbers after the journal title indicate: volume (issue number, optional), page numbers. Do not capitalize every word of the article title, only the first word, proper names, and the first word after a colon/period/dash. For an article that is available online, make the article title a link to the online version.

It is questionable whether one should abbreviate journal titles. On the one hand, many abbreviations are standardized ("J." for "Journal of") and library catalogs are often designed to help one look up abbreviated titles. On the other hand, abbreviations can be obscure to a person unused to scientific citations.

Newspaper/magazine articles (or online periodicals)

  • Blair, Eric Arthur (Aug. 29, 1949). "Looking forward to a bright tomorrow". New English Weekly, p. 57.

Or, for articles without a named author, put the title first:

  • "On the importance of modesty". (May 5, 1821). Pravda, pp. B1, C12.

Again, for online articles, make the article title a link to the URL; it may not be possible to supply a page number in this case, for example:

Web sites and articles (not from periodicals)

To cite an entire Web site, without specifying a specific document on the site, simply give the site's URL in the article text (this is an APA recommendation). In AstrologyNotes, a simple URL beginning with "http://" is automatically rendered clickable as well, which is what you want. Here is an example of such text: "Slashdot is a popular web site at http://slashdot.org/ ". Since you're referring to a general website, and not any particular content on it, you do not need to give a retrieval date.

Specific web pages (or sets of pages) are cited like books are (and you make the title a link), but with a retrieval date:

The parenthesized date should be the date/year the document was created, or last edited; this should be omitted if it cannot be determined. The "Retrieved" information helps a reader retrieve the same version that the writer viewed.

Note that it is a common alternative in AstrologyNotes to have a section labelled External links (after the References) and list various links to other sites and to pages within them. information on sources and other works they may have written.

Embedded HTML links for citations

The MediaWiki software supports embedding HTML links directly into an article. Simply using a bare URL (surrounded by whitespace) will cause the URL to be hyperlinked, but since some URLs are very long, this can make the result difficult to read. A more common alternative is to use a single square bracket, for example, [http://www.google.com/ Google's web site]. If only the URL is provided, those URLs are automatically numbered (making it appear like a footnote); an example would be [http://www.google.com/].

An advantage of these embedded links is that it is easy and fast to set up, but there are disadvantages as well such as increasing the liklihood of broken links, outdated information and confusing the reader with off-site links. Therefore, it is recommended to leave all citations and off-site links for the end of the article underneath the section ==External links==.

Numbered footnotes for external citations

Footnotes are sometimes useful for relevant text that would distract from the main point if embedded in the main text, yet are helpful in explaining a point in greater detail. This is how footnotes are used in legal writings; see any supreme court decision, for example, Texas vs. Johnson. Some articles may call out for a two-level text involving both a main text and extensive commentary, such as those found in legal writing or annotated historical or literary texts. Such footnotes can be especially helpful for later fact-checkers, to ensure that the article text is well-supported. Thus, using footnotes to provide useful clarifying information outside the main point is fine where this is needed.

Footnotes can also be used to simply cite sources, and there are some styles which do so. However, citations using numbered footnotes are controversial in Wikipedia for several reasons:

  1. The current MediaWiki software does not support footnotes very well. In particular, [automatic numbering of footnotes] conflicts with a common editing practice of bare URLs in single square brackets and the same footnote cannot be used multiple times with automatic numbering, rather a new number and note has to be used. In contrast, the software is currently quite sufficient to support the parenthetical author citation format suggested above.
  2. Many of today's style guides forbid or deprecate footnotes and reference endnotes when used simply to cite sources (Concordia Libraries). The author-date reference system is, according to the Oxford Guide to Style, "the most commonly used reference method in physical and social sciences. It provides the author's name and year of publication within parentheses in the text, and the full details at the end of the work in a list of references. It is in contrast to the author-title (short-title) system, which provides this information with a combination of footnotes or endnotes and the full reference at the end of the work." The [APA style], which is the basis of the current suggested Wikipedia source citation format, does not use footnotes to cite sources. [The MLA style manual] has deprecated reference footnotes and reference endnotes for decades in favor of in-line bibliographic references using author references.
  3. Footnotes and endnotes are normally simply numbered numerically. Thus, determining who said what typically requires a reader to continually jump back and forth between the main body and the footnote/endnote to see if there is something of value. When footnotes are simply providing a much more detailed argument, this is often not a problem, but if the footnotes are the primary citation method, this can be critical (since it is sometimes important to keep track of who claims what).

Note, however, that it is far more important to have citations than to worry about whether a footnote or an author-year format is used. In certain fields, the normal style of citation is through footnotes. The Chicago Manual of Style, for example, has a newer "Scientific" format (using author-date) and a traditional "Humanities" format that uses footnotes. And in particular, it is better to have footnote citations than no citations.

More information on footnotes can be found in the [Manual of Style - Footnotes]. The article [Footnote2] describes a simple template for implementing footnotes, namely, entering {{fn|1}} at the footnote location, and {{fnb|1}} at the list of notes. Note that this still requires manual renumbering at this time when a footnote is changed, but is the only system that can be used for notes in tables where many references to the same note are likely. An alternative system [Wikipedia:Footnote3] does allow automatic numbering of the references and notes although it has some limitations. See the [project page] for full details. Still another system is [Footnote4].


References

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