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This webpage covers the aspects of citation listed at left below. To move directly to information on the bibliography (also called references), click on the righthand column: 

Principles of Citation  Basic Examples  Working Citations into your Text

Principles of Referencing  General Reference Templates Sample References

Principles of Citation

Citations appear in parentheses in one of two places in your text: 

• after any fact or phrasing that you have taken from an outside source.
• after the name of an author you are summarizing.

As the name of this style implies, the citation includes NAME and DATE, that is, the last name of the author, and the date of publication. Sometimes the citation will also need to include the page number(s) of the original source. So a basic example looks like this: 

(Author 19XX) or (Author 19XX:Page)

Or, to put a real face on it, a book or article by Neil Postman would look like this: 

(Postman 1999) or (Postman 1999: 308)

Examples of Common Author-Date Citations

Note: Because the sample citations are hyperlinks to the sample bibliography, they will appear to be underlined on most browsers. Ordinarily, citations should not be underlined.

Work by a Single author	Option 1: The name and the date of the source can be enclosed in parentheses either when the work is first mentioned or after the information drawn from the source.  One influential study (Tung 1982) raised the same question. The results from studies that neglected the effects of liquid surface tension and viscosity only apply to the initial stages of droplet impact,when these forces are negligible (Tung 1982).  Option 2: When a writer mentions the author's name in the main part of the sentence, the citation only needs the date.  An influential study by Tung (1982) raised the same question.
More than one author	When a source has two authors, include both names. You may either spell out the word "and" or use the symbol "&", but be consistent. If the work has more than two authors, use the name of the first listed author, followed by "et al." which is an abbreviation for the Latin phrase "et alias" ("and others"). Because it is Latin, the phrase should be italicized or underlined. Note only "al." has a period after it.  A similar study endorsed photographic evidence (Chandra and Avedisian 1991), but some photographs (Akao et al. 1980) are not easily reproduced.
Same author(s), same year	When an author has written two articles in the same year, you differentiate between them with "a" for the first, "b" for the second, and so forth. If your paper refers only to one of these two articles,you do not need any letters.  Worthington's ground-breaking first study (1877a)was soon followed by a second (1877b).
Personal interview	Sometimes your sources will not be published documents. If you use information from a telephone conversation, for example, cite it just as you would any other source.  One mid-level computer programmer estimated that she spends 25%- 30% of her time writing reports and memos for her clients (Jerz 1996).

Working Citations into your Writing 

This section covers ways to use citations, and a caution about the position of citations in your text. Essentially you can use citations in three ways: 

• General Reference
• Paraphrase
• Direct Quotation.

  General references, like all of the examples above, refer to the entirety of a study rather than a specific page or concept. This is the most common type of reference in technical writing. 
  Paraphrase typically involves the summary of a single part of another author's work, for example: 

  Single-shot flash photography yields better results than fast-motion movies (Chandra and Avedisian 1991:15).

  Note that the writer has included the page number here because the information comes from a specific point in the original work.  Chandra and Avedisian's original looked like this: 

  A variety of high-speed ciné film and short-duration single-shot photographic techniques have been used to this end (see, for example, Worthington 1908; Savic & Boult 1955; Watchers & Westerling 1966; Toda 1974;Akao et al. 1980; Inada et al. 1983). The method which has yielded the greatest clarity is single-shot flash photography.

  The writer has determined that only the comparison between movies and stillflash pictures is important enough to repeat, and rephrased to emphasize that comparison. Even though the writer does not use the exact words, the paraphrased detail still comes from Chandra and Avedisian, who listed six different sources to defend their point.  An author who uses Chandra and Avedisian's statement is ethically obligated to give them credit. Without proper documentation, the statement would at best function as mere opinion, and would be of little or no professional value; at worst, it would be plagiarism. 

  Direct quotation is not used much in technical writing, often only when one is trying to show how stupid another writer is; however, occasionally, you might encounter something written so well, you just have to quote it. Here is a sample below: 

  Previous studies did not address this issue, however, because "they neglected any effects of liquid surface tension and viscosity, so that their results are applicable only to the initial stages of droplet impact, when these forces are negligible compared to their inertial effects [at the time of impact]" (Pasandideh-Fard et al. 1996:650).

  The writer took a piece of information directly from page 650, reproduced it word-for-word, and gave  appropriate credit to the original authors. (Square brackets signify the addition of clarification material to the quoted passage.) 

A Word of Warning: Where you place the citation can have significant impact on meaning. These two examples mean different things, even thought the words are the same: 

Example 1	Example 2
...some photographs (Akao et al. 1980) are not easily reproduced.	Some photographs are not easily reproduced (Akao et al. 1980).
The left-hand sentence means Akao et al.'s photographs are hard to reproduce, whereas the sentence on the right means that Akao et al. claimed that some other (unspecified) photos are hard to reproduce. In the first instance, the reader will assume you tried to reproduce Akao et al.'s photos, and in the second, the reader will assume that Akao at al. tried to reproduce photos. So in positioning the citation, make sure it indicates what you intend.

 

Next: Principles of Referencing - Making a Bibliography

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