Cite management
Image: Kristopher Roller on Unsplash
All writing which makes claims based on available information requires citation. To help use citations effectively, it’s important to understand why we use them and how to use citations appropriately in context.
A citation has two functions. Firstly, a citation provides a reference an original document to authenticate the claim being made by the author. The second function is to enhance the readability of the paragraph. To sustain the flow of an argument, a citation appears either as a footnote, an endnote or in brackets within the body text.
Broadly speaking, there are 2 main citation systems:
documentary–note
author–date.
Different disciplines favour different citation systems for references, with further variations depending on the style guide being applied.
For example, the Australian guide to legal citations (AGLC) style is a variation of the documentary–note system that requires authors to include a superscript number in the text which correlates to a footnote at the bottom of the page providing details of the reference being cited, supported by a complete bibliography of all sources at the end of the document.
By contrast, a scientifically-derived style like the American Psychological Association (APA) style is based on the author–date system that requires users to provide the name of the author and the date of the publication in the text within parentheses, then a reference list at the end of the document.
My own PhD in creative writing used the Modern Language Association (MLA) style guide. Because this style caters to close readings, I used author–date citations in-text which included page numbers for every piece of quoted material. Here the complete references are contained in a ‘works cited’ list as well as a list of ‘works consulted’.
Making sure the citation system is both appropriate for the context and up-to-date is a constant juggle for editors. For example, many of the documents I referenced in my PhD (completed in 2019) were from online sources without page numbers. This meant inserting the abbreviation 'n.p.' within many of my parenthetic citations. While the MLA has remained the system of choice in creative writing academia for the last decade, I have noticed a switch to APA style in online journals to accommodate citations which link to a source online, typically through a URL or a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
As a writer and researcher who has enjoyed following citations to the source of an idea, I'm most excited by the way referencing online will affect the transfer of knowledge and ideas. By taking a word from the sentence and making it a hyperlink, articles like this allow for a citation to provide immediate authentication. But most importantly from an editorial perspective, these citations protect and enhance the readability of the piece.
For a detailed explanation of how to use the different referencing systems, including comprehensive examples, see the referencing and attribution section of the Australian Government Style manual.
