Sources: How to Cite Sources: Fields

Table of contents

How to cite sources

From sources to citations

Sources types

Fields

Citation formats

Citation styles

EACH CITATION must be sufficient for a reader to locate the work in question. A citation must include certain information, organized by fields, that depends on the source type. You should collect this information for any given source type, ranging from books to lectures to Web pages, and then translate this material into the fields required for the citation. As you work with a given source, be careful to collect all the relevant information that you later will need to construct its citation. Some commonly required fields include:

Author(s) This might be an individual or individuals, a corporation such as IBM or Dartmouth College, a governmental organization like the Environmental Protection Agency, or a non-governmental organization like Greenpeace.

Title There are different levels of "title" in some source types. In such cases, citations must include both the specific title of the smallest unit of the work and the general title of the work. For example, a journal article requires title fields for the title of the article and the title of the journal. For books in a series, you need the title of the individual book as well as the title of the series. A Web citation may require the title of the page as well as the main title for the Web site.

Year of publication Note that for some source types, like conference proceedings, it is not the date of the conference but the publication date that is relevant. For Web sites, this would be either a prominent date on the page or the date it was last updated.

Place published This applies primarily to books and conference proceedings, where the main address of the publisher is given. Citations to many source types such as journals, movies, or software do not include this field.

Publisher This applies primarily to books and conference proceedings. The publisher of a Web site is often the author as well.

Volume This applies to journals, books in series, encyclopedias, and any other source published in some sort of sequence where a number is given. For books spanning more than one volume, the total number of volumes should also be noted.

Number This is the issue number of a journal, often specified only if each issue is separately paginated.

Edition This applies primarily to books; later editions need to specified, since the material may vary from edition to edition.

Pages This is crucial information for journal, magazine, or newspaper articles. It is also used for parts of books, book chapters and papers in conference proceedings, or anytime just a few pages are being cited. When the citation is to the complete work such as a book or conference proceedings, no pages are specified.

Type of work For certain less usual source types, citations also include a field which simply designates source type. Examples of such source types include maps, artwork, graphs, tables, CD-ROMs, personal communications, Web sites, computer programs, patents, or theses.

Availability This refers to an electronic address or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) on the World Wide Web.

Date of access This is the date (m/d/y) you personally accessed the Web site or other on-line source.