Biocrawler:Cite sources

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

Biocrawler articles should cite their sources, preferably reliable sources.

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.

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 Biocrawler.
• Avoiding claims of plagiarism or intellectual dishonesty.
• Avoiding the impression that you are making stuff up.

When you add content

For all of the above reasons, 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 adding information from memory, you should actively search for authoritative references to cite. 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. This is a good opportunity to check your own facts. Who knows; you might find that what you were about to write was incorrect or incomplete. 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 weasel 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 quotation. Picking a single person or group as representative of a larger school of thought is fine, as long as they really are representative. (You may want to pick more than one source.) As also implicitly described in the official NPOV policy, even if the citation is from a reputable source, it should provide the reader the gist of the research on a certain subject and not present the reader with carefully selected out-of-context quotes to support a certain point of view.

Remember that Biocrawler is not for your opinions or for original research.

When there is no factual dispute

Yes, articles need references even if there is no factual dispute among editors. There might be a dispute in the future, and there are many other reasons to have good citations, as mentioned in the introduction.

Adding general or specific citations to articles which lack them (whether or not you wrote it) is an excellent way to contribute to the encyclopedia. See Biocrawler:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards and Biocrawler:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check for organized efforts to do this.

When there is a factual dispute

Disputed statements for which a credible source has not been provided may be removed from Biocrawler articles. The disputed material should generally be moved to the article's talk page, to give an opportunity for editors to identify sources for the material.

Disputed information which, if verified, would remain in an article, should be placed on the article's talk page. Potentially useful information ought to be retained — and by placing disputed information on the talk page, you give other users the opportunity to find sources to support it, in which case the information could be re-inserted into the article proper. This guideline does not endorse or mandate that all unsourced information must be removed: it is recognised that some information is self-evident and that a source for it might not be necessary, or that something may be true and accurate but as-yet unsourced. However, it does make clear that users who, in good faith, dispute information to an article may remove that information and, where, if verified, the material would be suitable for the article, paste it to the talk page.

Style and how-to

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. You can quickly insert inline references to web pages by inserting a URL surrounded by single square brackets; this does not provide as much information to readers, but it is much better than not citing your sources at all. For example, to cite the present page this way, you would insert [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocrawler:Cite_sources], which the reader would see as [1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocrawler:Cite_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 (inline citations) and at the end

At the end of an article, under a ==References== heading, list the complete reference information as a bulleted (*) list, one per reference work. A numbered reference list, although common in many publications, is currently discouraged in Biocrawler; see below for discussion of this.

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

Where an article has a references section, some editors call the external links section ==Further reading==, because the references section may also contain external links.

In addition to listing a reference at the end, you may choose to embed a pointer to a particular reference within the article text. This is called Harvard referencing. 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, if 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

Formatting of the reference list is a secondary detail, and there is currently no consensus on a precise prescribed citation format in Biocrawler. Therefore, 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. Many other style guides, such as The Chicago Manual of Style's newer "Scientific format", use essentially the same style.

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 Biocrawler 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 Biocrawler 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 (http://print.google.com/):

• Nash, Robert Jay (1994). Alferd Packer. In Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen & Outlaws (http://www.google.com/print?id=rE2M3NojQj8C&dq=alferd+packer&oi=print&pg=250&prev=http%3A//print.google.com/print%3Fq%3Dalferd%2Bpacker&sig=Xaf7ylB7pWgbd1zKXSCYjYQd_TI&prev=http%3A//www.google.com/search%3Fq%3Dbook%2Balferd%2Bpacker%26sourceid%3Dmozilla-search%26start%3D0%26start%3D0%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official). Da Capo Press. pp. 250. ISBN 030680591X. Google Print. Retrieved April 13, 2005.

Amazon's search inside the book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/104-0262299-7124713) feature provides less data to non-registered users but is still quite useful. Consider:

• Nash, Robert Jay (1994). Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen & Outlaws (http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/030680591X/ref=sib_dp_srch_pop/104-0262299-7124713?v=search-inside&keywords=alferd+packer&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Go%21). Da Capo Press. pp. 250. ISBN 030680591X. Amazon Books. Retrieved April 13, 2005.

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:

• Chalmers, Rachel (Sep. 1, 2000). Guru of the Unix gurus (http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/09/01/rich_stevens/index.html). Salon.

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 Biocrawler, 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:

• Gates, Bill & Ballmer, Steve (1998). "The Big Open-source Advocacy Homepage" (http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween1.php). Retrieved Aug. 5, 2003.

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, using tools such as the Internet Archive.

Note that it is a common alternative in Biocrawler to have a section labelled External links (after the References) and list various links to other sites and to pages within them.

Other-language wikipedias

When you use an article from a different-language Biocrawler as a reference, it belongs in the reference section. Use an external link rather than an interwiki link to avoid an unnecesary self-reference:

• Citau les fonts (http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquipèdia:Citau_les_fonts) from the Catalan-language Biocrawler. Retrieved December 27, 2004.

If you are getting some or all of your references second-hand, because you translated all or part of an article from a different-language Biocrawler, you may want to start your reference section (or part of it) with something like this (from Paragraph 175):

• Much of the content of this article comes from the equivalent German-language wikipedia article (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_175). The following references are cited by that German-language article:

followed by a list of that different-language article's references.

Company press releases

This is how to reference a company publication:

• Siemens AG (July 13, 1999). Shell and Siemens to develop emission-free fuel cell power plant (http://www.siemens.com/page/1,3771,229910-1-11_0_0-0,00.html). Press Release.

If the press release is also available online, make the title a link to the URL.

Notes

Example APA styles for many other document types can be found at the "Citation Style Guides" page (http://library.concordia.ca/help/howto/citations.html). Ultimately, though, use your common sense — what information does the reader need in order to find the reference in question?

Page ranges should use an "en" dash (–, –), not a hyphen (-).

It is also useful to link author names to their Biocrawler page [if any], assuming that they have not already been linked to in the article text, to give background information on sources and other works they may have written.

Citation templates

The following templates have been implemented towards making following the above citation styles easier. These are in the process of being expanded to cover all categories defined above. Whether they are preferable to "plain-text" citations, as above, however, is left to the writer's discretion.

WikiBib (http://www.qwikly.com/WikiBib.html) is a simple bibliography maker written in javascript that has most of these templates built in.

These are examples of how to use templates to cite books, journals, and web sites (other citation types to come):

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 (http://wikisource.org/wiki/Texas_v._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 Biocrawler 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 Biocrawler 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 Biocrawler: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 Biocrawler: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 Biocrawler:Footnote4.

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 for an online reader to click on the link and jump immediately to the cited article, if the article is still at the given URL and still contains the cited information. Another advantage of these embedded links is that they are very easy to create and maintain.

There are several disadvantages with such embedded links, however. Such links do not normally provide all the information that a traditional citation would have; thus, if the material moves or is dramatically changed, it can be very difficult to rediscover the cited material. If all that citation information is included in the embedded text, the result is unwieldy text. Automatically-numbered links have some additional problems. Automatically-numbered links provide no information to the reader before moving the mouse to the link, so it can be difficult to determine if the same author is referenced in different citations or not. Also, there is a limitation of the WikiMedia software: if the same URL is referenced multiple times, each citation is given a different number; this means that a reader generally has no idea when the same article is referenced multiple times.

For these reasons, embedded HTML links are discouraged as a choice of citation format. Instead, consider using either a footnoting system or one of the reference templates (both of these methods are discussed above) to preserve all of the valuable citation information.

Again though, it is far more important to cite sources than worry about formatting. If the choice is between using embedded HTML links and not citing sources, please cite sources whatever way you like. There are a number of articles which do use the format of embedded hypertext links, for example, Internet Explorer.

Amount of citation detail

A citation should include enough information to allow a reader to find your sources. In particular, be sure to give page numbers or section numbers of a lengthy work if only a small portion is referenced (and it is not immediately obvious where to look). Sometimes, you may want to give a more complete explanation of how you know something, or why your sources are credible. If the issue is important, please consider discussing that in the article itself. After all, other readers may need that information as well. Otherwise, you can leave a note on the article's talk page. This will not necessarily help readers, but it can help later Biocrawlerns trying to improve the article.

Citing Biocrawler

Inside a Biocrawler article, reference another Biocrawler article simply by surrounding its name with two square braces, for example, [[Biocrawler]]. If this does not flow, use a renaming reference, for example, [[Biocrawler|Biocrawler's contents]] (also known as pipe-linking as the vertical bar symbol is called a "pipe"). This is not an external reference, but it is very useful for readers. In general, only create a link to another Biocrawler article the first time a reference is made (though occasional exceptions for consistency or because it is a long article can be justified); otherwise, a page may be full of links and become difficult to read for some people.

Avoid duplicating references on a single topic unnecessarily — put the references in the most specific Biocrawler article on that topic, and not in other articles that link to that article. (Thus, for example, this article does not cite the APA, since there is a whole Biocrawler article on just that subject.)

For suggestions on how to cite Biocrawler in other works, see Biocrawler:Citing Biocrawler

See also

• Biocrawler:Approval mechanism

References

• Concordia Libraries (Concordia University). Citation and Style Guides (http://library.concordia.ca/help/howto/citations.html). Retrieved December 28, 2004. (This provides a list of common citation styles.)
• Citation Styles Handbook: APA (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/cws/wworkshop/writer_resources/citation_styles/apa/apa.htm)
• Citation Styles Handbook: MLA (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/cws/wworkshop/writer_resources/citation_styles/mla/mla.htm)
• APA Style.org (http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html)
• Using American Psychological Association (APA) Format (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_apa.html) (Updated to 5th Edition)
• Citing Electronic Documentation (http://www.rhetoric.umn.edu/Student/Graduate/~mstewart/citations/) (APA, Chicago, MLA)
• The Columbia Guide to Online Style (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/cgos/idx_basic.html)
• Psychology with Style: A Hypertext Writing Guide (http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/apa4b.htm)
• A Guide for Writing Research Papers Based on Modern Language Association (MLA) Documentation (http://webster.commnet.edu/mla/index.shtml)
• AMA Citation Style (http://www.liunet.edu/cwis/cwp/library/workshop/citama.htm)
• Chicago/Turabian Documentation (http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/DocChiWorksCited.html)
• Citation Guide - Turabian (http://library.concordia.ca/help/howto/turabian.pdf) (.PDF file)
• General Guidelines for Citing Government Publications (http://www.library.unt.edu/govinfo/citate/Citegen.html)
• Guide to Citation Style Guides (http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/journalism/cite.html)
• Sociology style (ASR) (http://www.stthomas.edu/libraries/guides/quickref/citing/ASRstyle.htm)
• Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html)ca:Viquipèdia:citau les fonts

fr:Wikipédia:Citez vos sources ja:Biocrawler:引用元を明記する sl:Wikipedija:Navajanje virov sv:Biocrawler:Källhänvisningar zh:Biocrawler:文献的引用