Finding information in health and lifestyle

1.5.7 Referencing

We mentioned above that we need to reference sources to ensure we abide by copyright legislation. But there is another reason we need to give accurate references to items we use ? so we can share it.

Consider this scenario. A friend says they?ve just read an interesting article where Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us has spoken about why it isn?t a faceted search system, and you should read it. How would you go about finding it? Would you start looking in a news database, a search engine or a journals database? When I tried this by putting Joshua Schachter?s name into various search tools, using 'delicious' as a search term, and 'faceted' as a term I found I got lots of articles, but I didn?t know whether any of them was the right one, as none of them seemed quite right. So what is the minimum level of information needed to find the right article?

Activity ? what information is needed to find the correct source?

For the following types of resource, identify necessary and sufficient information to be able to discover an item with a degree of certainty that it is the correct one.

Complete the table by choosing from the list below to identify what you feel is the minimum level of information for each type of resource. E.g. for Book you might feel that ISBN and author is sufficient so your first row would be:

Director, author, title, article title, broadcaster, type of podcast, ISBN, publisher, pages, date, volume, title of video, where it was published, author/organisation, date you visited the site, issue number, URL

Answer

This is what we thought:

You also need accurate information to be able to find resources you have used in the past. Sometimes an ISBN number or URL just isn?t enough. What happens if the book goes out of print, or the web page is withdrawn or someone gives an incorrect reference? By giving more information, you increase the chance of being able to locate the item again.

You may also find that the level of detail you need to give varies according to the purpose. For example if you want to buy a book from Amazon, usually an author and/or title is sufficient. For a reading list, you would usually include the year too, as often academic text books have different editions, so the year is important to make sure you?ve got the right version.

To help people to share this information, reference styles have been developed. These are standards that specify what information is required to produce a reference, and how it should be laid out in a consistent manner. If you read an academic article or book, you will often find a list of references at the end. Depending on what courses you study, you may have to write an essay, in which case you will be expected to acknowledge the sources used in a bibliography or reference list.

You will see reference styles also called citation styles. For this unit, consider 'reference' to mean the same thing as 'citation'.

The minimum elements for all references are:

• author or equivalent

• title

• date

• publisher

• place ? either physical location or URL

The thing that changes from style to style is how they look when you write the reference for your bibliography, and how you present them in the text.

Activity ? exploring reference styles

Try the citation builder at Calvin. Type in the following reference into the citation builder using 'Electronic' under 'Source type' and 'Journal' under 'Resource'.

Havi Hannah Carel (2006) ‘Moral and Epistemic Ambiguity in Oedipus Rex?, Janus Head.

Have a look at the reference in each of the different styles (MLA, APA, Chicago) and see if you can spot the differences.

Answer

Here are the three references produced by this tool.

MLA: Carel, Havi H. "Moral and Epistemic Ambiguity in Oedipus Rex." Janus Head.

APA: Carel, H. H. (2006). Moral and Epistemic Ambiguity in Oedipus Rex. Janus Head, 9(1), 97-115. Retrieved November 20, 2006, from http://www.janushead.org/9-1/Carel.pdf

Chicago: Carel, Havi H. "Moral and Epistemic Ambiguity in Oedipus Rex."Janus Head.

As you can see, the differences tend to be in how each reference is formatted. In MLA and Chicago styles the author names are given in full, whereas APA has used initials for first names. MLA underlines the journal title, but the other two styles italicise it. They each format the volume and issue number differently. There are other differences that make each style unique, but the core information remains the same. Leeds University Library provides a list of useful citation and referencing links where you can see examples of a range of different styles.

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence