CITATION

GUIDE

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

NORTH DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY

By Claire Strom 2003, Rev. 2005

 

All these citation rules are from The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. If you need further help, please refer to this book or ask your professor/advisor.

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CITATIONS

1. Citations General Rules

1. Why Use Citations?

Historians and scholars use notes for two purposes:

 

•  To give credit to other scholars and the sources you use. Most history is compiled from other documents. From these other documents, historians gain facts, ideas, and concepts. By citing your sources you become part of the greater community of scholars. The notes will contextualize you and your information for your audience. Citations also allow your readers to judge the quality of your ideas and research and further their own research by accessing your source material.

•  To legally tell your readers where your facts, ideas, and concepts come from, so that you can avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism is the theft of intellectual property. If you use someone else's information and/or ideas without correct citations then you are guilty of plagiarism.

 

2. When to note

You do not need to note commonly accepted facts. World War II started in 1939 would not need a citation. However, any facts that commonly would not be known, that you gained from your research, need citations. As a rule, it is better to over-note than under-note. Generally, each paragraph in your work should have a note with the possible exceptions of the introduction and conclusion.

 

3. Using linked note format

Both Word and WordPerfect programs have linked note capacity. When you want to insert a citation in your text go up to “Insert” on the toolbar. Scroll down to “reference” or “footnote.” At this point you can chose a number format—use just traditional Arabic numerals—and whether you want footnotes or endnotes. Once you click “okay,” a number will appear in your text and a box will open up at the bottom of your page for you to type your citation text.

This program is important because if you cut and move text, the citations will move and automatically renumber themselves.

 

4. Types of Citations

Within the discipline of history, there are a number of sub-disciplines that have different citation styles. In academic journals dealing with European history, each fact is noted in the text with a corresponding citation. If you are writing a paper on European history, you will need to follow this style.

In academic journals that address American and Latin-American history, compound citations are used. These group together all the references for one paragraph in one citation. If you are writing on these topics, you will need to follow this style.

If you are doing an essay dealing with other areas of the world or a comparative essay, ask your professor or advisor which style you should follow.

 

5. Compound Citations

As you are working on your paper, you may find it useful to cite every piece of information. When you edit your work, the citations will travel to their new location automatically. However, when you finish your piece, you should have no more than one citation at the end of each paragraph. This should be a compound citation, where each source is noted in the order the information appears in the paragraph. The citation should be separated by a semi-colon.

White, The Middle Ground, 75-76; Dan Flores, “Bison Diplomacy,” Journal of American History 67 (January 1997): 45; Jan Phelps, Being Indian in a White World

(Fargo: North Dakota State University Press, 1996), 34-56, 87, 115-46.

 

6. Quotations in compound citations

If you have one or more quotations in a paragraph, these need to be specifically identified in the citation. To do this put "quotation from" at the beginning of the specific reference.

White, The Middle Ground, 75-76; quotation from Dan Flores, “Bison Diplomacy,” Journal of American History 67 (January 1997): 45; Jan Phelps, Being Indian in a White World (Fargo: North Dakota State University Press, 1996), 34-56, 87, 115-46.

 

7. Repeat citations in compound notes

If you are using a citation at different places in the same paragraph (i.e., several pages from the same book or letters from the same collection), place all the citations together the first time the source is used.

 

White, The Middle Ground, 75-76, 134-46; quotation from Dan Flores, “Bison Diplomacy,” Journal of American History 67 (January 1997): 45; Jan Phelps, Being Indian in a White World (Fargo: North Dakota State University Press, 1996), 34-56, 87, 115-46.

 

8. Footnotes or Endnotes?

The format for footnotes and endnotes is exactly the same. Some professors prefer footnotes, some endnotes. The same is true for journals, presses, and conference organizers. The best thing to do is to learn both and be prepared to adapt from one to the other.

 

9. Discursive Notes

Notes can also be used to add a discussion or additional information that you do not want in the text. If you have some information that is peripheral to your main point--maybe it is historiographical for example, and you do not want to include it your paper--you may want to include it in a citation. These informational notes allow you to share important knowledge with your readers without breaking the narrative flow of your document.

 

2. Citations Noting Books

 

1. First citation

The first time you mention a book in your chapter or paper, you need to give all the information.

 

John Helgeland, Civil Religion in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 45-50.

 

Book titles should be underlined or italicized. It does not matter which, but you should be consistent throughout your citations. Please remember that you do not need to use a “p.” before the page number. If you have difficulty determining the copyright date, look at the library entry for the volume. This should have the correct date. It is a good idea to keep a printout of these entries at hand when doing your notes. If a book is a reprint, the publishing information should look like this.

 

(1920; repr., New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1988)

 

2. Subsequent citations

In later mentions of a book in your chapter or paper, you should use an abbreviated reference.

 

Helgeland, Civil Religion, 134-40.

 

If you cite the book in a subsequent chapter, you should again use the long reference first. Note that in the abbreviated citation, the comma after the title is also underlined. This is correct. Also note that the “1” is dropped in the second page number. This is correct for page numbers over 99.

 

3. Edited books

Edited books should be cited as follows:

 

Jim Norris, ed., Betabaleros in the Red River Valley (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 34.

 

If you want to reference a particular article in an edited book, use this format:

 

Gerritdina Justitz, “The Reformation,” in Events that Changed the World Through the Sixteenth Century, ed. Frank Thackeray and John Findling (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 166.

 

3. Citations Noting Articles

 

1. First citation

Again, the first citation should give the complete information and repeated in subsequent chapters.

 

Larry R. Peterson, “Is the Family Disappearing? Northern Great Plains Vs. National Trends in Family Structure,” Great Plains Research 9 (Spring 1999): 145-63.

 

Please note that the journal title is seen as equivalent to a book title and needs to be italicized or underlined. There is no punctuation after the journal title. The punctuation before the page numbers for a journal is a colon, not a comma.

 

2. Subsequent citations

Peterson, “Is the Family Disappearing?” 3-15.

 

4. Citations Noting Primary Sources

 

Remember when citing primary sources that the idea is to give your readers enough information that they can follow your research footsteps easily. Therefore, a general rule is to give as much information as possible.

 

1. Newspapers

If possible you should provide the author and title of an article, if these are given, together with the name of the newspaper and date.

 

Tom Isern, "Buffalo in North Dakota Today," Fargo Forum, July 30, 1999.

 

Note the appropriate date format--month, day, year, with no abbreviations.

If the name of the city is uncommon, then the state should be added in parentheses. It should also be in italics/underline.

 

Fargo (North Dakota) Forum

 

If the city is not mentioned, then it should be added (with the state if necessary) in parentheses after the title and not in italics/underline.

 

Daily Eagle (Valdosta, Georgia)

 

2. Government Documents

There are many different types of government documents from extension records to legal cases. Some, such as congressional documents and court decisions, have specific citation methods that can be found in Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. For others, such as agricultural experiment station bulletins, you should adapt either the book or the article format, which ever makes the most sense.

The most important thing to remember is to be consistent in the way you cite these sources.

 

E. C. Cotton, “The North American Fever Tick,” Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Tennessee, Bulletin 113 (March 1915): 33.

 

Or:

 

E. C. Cotton, The North American Fever Tick. Bulletin 113 (Knoxville: Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Tennessee, March 1915), 33.

 

3. Manuscripts

There is no set way to cite manuscript sources. You need to give sufficient information that others can find the material. Most archives have specific information that they want included in your citation, and you should ask them while you are researching.

The general citation rule for manuscripts is to go from small to large. So first cite your document, then your file, box, collection, archive, and town. Here are several examples:

 

Gerald Anderson, “My Life Among Norwegian-Americans,” p. 3, undated MSS, Anderson Collection, University of Minnesota Archives, Minneapolis, Minn.

 

Mark Harvey to James Watt, September 1, 1980, File 34-S, Box 4, Environmental Protest Papers, State Historical Society of North Dakota Archives, Bismarck, North Dakota.

 

Please notice that the date has no “st,” “rd,” or “th” after the numbers.

 

4. Oral Interviews

For oral interviews you need to tell your reader who interviewed whom, where, when, and where the tapes/transcripts can be found.

 

Dennis Cooley interviewed by author, April 3, 2000, Fargo, North Dakota (tape in possession of author).

 

Dennis Cooley interviewed by Stacy Knobloch, April 3, 2000, Fargo, North Dakota (tape 25, in Oral History Collection, State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck, North Dakota).

 

5. Citations Internet Sources

 

The internet provides us with a large amount of information and is a useful research tool for all historians. However, it must be used with caution for two main reasons:

 

•  Unlike books and articles, web pages are transitory. A site you accessed and used information from while writing your paper may have disappeared by the time that your professor is grading your work. This makes it impossible for anyone to assess the accuracy and validity of your work. Therefore you need to be careful and critical in judging web pages and the information they offer.

 

•  Unlike many scholarly books and articles, m any internet sites are not reviewed by other academics before being issued. Therefore the information on them could be completely inaccurate. Use your research skills to determine if a site is valid or not. Usually, a good site will give you enough information about the hard copy of its documents that you will be able to create an archival citation—go to the Library of Congress website and look at some of their documents in their American Memory collection for examples. All of these documents give you enough information to cite the original hard copy document as well as the web page.

 To guard against these problems:

 

•  Use the web critically. Judge the accuracy and validity of web pages the same way you judge all other sources.

•  If you use a web page, try to find a citation for a hard paper document and cite that as well as the web page.

•  Check the web page a couple of times to make sure it is still there and put the date you accessed the page in your citation.

 

For more information on web citation, see The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition or Melvin E. Page website at http://www.h-net.org/about/citation/

 

Bibliography

 

A bibliography provides your reader with a list of all your sources at the end of your document. Again, you can find

all the necessary citation rules in The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. In historical works, bibliographies are usually divided into types of documents, with this basic hierarchy:

 

Primary Sources

Newspapers

Government Documents

Manuscript Collections

 

Secondary Sources

Books

Articles

 

You might find it necessary for your work to add additional categories. Within each category, arrange your entries alphabetically.

 1. Bibliography Books

 

Danbom, David B. Born in the County: A History of Rural America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

 

The author’s name is reversed, periods are used instead of commas in a number of places and the publishing information is not in parentheses. The indentation is to make the author’s name more accessible to the reader.

 

Edited books

  Edited books should be cited as follows.

 

Norris, Jim, ed. Betabaleros in the Red River Valley. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

2. Bibliography Noting Articles

 

Peterson, Larry R. “Is the Family Disappearing? Northern Great Plains Vs. National Trends in Family Structure.” Great Plains Research 9 (Spring 1999): 145-63.

 

Please note that with journal articles you give the inclusive page numbers of the article in the bibliography.

 

3. Bibliography Primary Sources

 

1. Newspapers

These work exactly the same way as in notes

 

Daily Eagle (Valdosta, Georgia)

 

Fargo (North Dakota) Forum

 

2. Government Documents

Here again, refer to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition to see if there is a specific citation style. Otherwise, just adapt one.

 

Cotton, E. C. “The North American Fever Tick,” Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Tennessee, Bulletin 113. March 1915.

 

3. Manuscripts

For archival information you need to list the collection and the archive in the bibliography. Here are several examples:

 

Agricultural Experiment Station Papers, University of Minnesota Archives, Minneapolis, Minn.

 

Environmental Protest Papers, State Historical Society of North Dakota Archives, Bismarck, North Dakota.

 

4. Oral Interviews

For oral interviews you need to tell your reader who interviewed whom, where, when, and where the tapes/transcripts can be found.

 

Cooley, Dennis. Interview by author. Fargo, North Dakota. April 3, 2000 (tape in possession of author).

 

Cooley, Dennis. Interview by Stacy Knobloch. April 3, 2000. Tape 25, Oral History Collection, State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck, North Dakota.

 

4. Bibliography Internet Sources

 

For more information on web bibliography , see The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition or Melvin E. Page website at http://www.h-net.org/about/citation/bibliographic.html.