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How to Cite

COMP107 Lectures

Referencing is a description that identifies an information source, whereas citation is the use of a reference in text.

  • It is not a good practice to simply list all your references at the end of a document without a connection.
  • Need to clearly mark what is your own work and what is the work of others.
  • Need to help readers get more information on what they are interested in.

Stylistic Choices

You should place citations:

  • Before the punctuation mark (Smith,1994).
  • At a logical place (Smith,1994) in the sentence.
  • At a grammatically correct place in a sentence:
    According to Smith (1994), there are 50 billion neurons in the human brain.
  • Before a list of items:
    There are five categories of users (Anderson, 2008): Students, teachers, professors, technical staff, administrative staff.
  • Following quotations:
    “This is a really cool quotation.” (Guy, That, 1994, p. 345)

There are examples of correct and incorrect cases on the slides

Bibliography Style

A bibliography style determines how the citations and references are presented.

  1. Ordinal Number

    Sources listed in the bibliography are sorted according to some ordering, typically based on the authors; names, and numbered consecutively.

    Citations in the text are given as lists of numbers coss-referencing the bibliography, enclosed in square brackets.

  2. Author-Date

    Sources in the reference list are arranged alphabetically by the authors’ surnames.

    Work by the same authors are arranged by year of publication, starting with the earliest.

    More than one work with the same authors and date, a letter is added to the year of publication to distinguish them.

    The year of the publication typically immediately follows the list of authors.

  3. Abbreviation

    Mix of ordinal number style and author-date style.

    Sources in the bibliography are presented like in ordinal number style, but instead of numbering them, each source is given an unique identifier based on authors’ names and year of publication, with additional letter to disambiguate duplicate abbreviations.

Examples of all of these and best practices are given in the slides.