Citing sources

Why cite sources?

Citations provide the information necessary for identifying the sources consulted when you write an article or a book or prepare a presentation.

A source is cited every time a portion of a text by another author is reproduced in its entirety, in this case duly encased in quotation marks, or else reference is made to a certain theory of an author, reprocessing it in a different way via a synthesis or a paraphrase. Special sources such as interviews, multimedial recordings, web sources, lecture notes, manuscripts, communications, primary research data or any other external source must also be duly cited. The sum total of the sources used constitutes the backbone of a scientific paper and goes into the final bibliography.

In the drafting of academic and scientific texts, correct citing of the sources consulted, giving credit to the author or authors, is a fundamentally important aspect, both to enable readers to locate the cited work in a clear and unambiguous way and to identify the type of document consulted (monograph, journal article, thesis, web site, etc.), and to lend solidity and accuracy to your work but also to avoid accusations of plagiarism.

The bibliographical apparatus of a scientific paper is made up of the citations present within the text, subsequently referred to in an organised and detailed fashion in the final bibliography.

Citation style

The citation style is a standardised set of rules to be utilised in the drafting of scientific texts, making for a correct and orderly organisation of the information contained in a bibliographical citation.

There exist various citational styles, each traditionally associated with specific discipline areas, which give rise to the formal characteristics of the citation: order and choice of elements to be used (author, title, publisher, date, number of pages), formatting and punctuation. 

There follows a brief overview of the main citational styles and their related discipline areas of use:

• American Psychological Association (APA) - discipline areas: Psychology, Social Sciences.
• Associazione Italiana Biblioteche (AIB) Studi - discipline area: human sciences.  
• the Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS) - there are two different forms of Chicago Style: the Notes style and the Author-Date style, which differ not for the elements contained in the citation but for the placing of the date in the citation. In the Chicago Author-Date style, used mainly for the physical sciences, life sciences and social sciences, the year of publication is placed immediately after the first element, usually the name of the author. In the Chicago Notes style, used mainly for historical studies, the position of the date varies according to the resource, although it is generally not placed immediately after the name of the author.  
• Chicago / Turabian Manual of Style - a synthetic version of the CMoS geared mainly to students.
• Harvard Format Citation Guide - discipline areas: human sciences, natural sciences and social sciences. 
• Modern Language Association (MLA) - discipline area: human sciences. 
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) - discipline areas: computer science and electronic engineering.
• Nature - discipline areas: pure and applied sciences.

SEARCH, the catalogue of the SNS Library, enables the exportation of bibliographical references of resources found using four different styles: Modern Language Association style (MLA, ed. 7. and 8.), American Psychological Association (APA), Chicago Turabian Manual of Style (CmoS/Turabian) and Harvard referencing citation format.

Online guides, manuals, and tutorials

[AIB Studi] Norme per le citazioni bibliografiche e la bibliografia finale (Rules for bibliographical citations and the final bibliography)
Reference pages on the AIB WEB portal, complete with examples of use of the Associazione Italiana Biblioteche style; it also includes indications and examples of citation of the archival sources.

American Psychological Association 
A guide with a wealth of examples for numerous types of source, in Italian, curated by the Library System of the University of Bologna.

Chicago Manual of Style (standard) [CMoS] 
On the CMoS pages curated by the Chicago University Press, this Quick Guide illustrates both styles of the CMoS in a synthetic but efficacious manner, with practical examples. 
This guide to the Author-Date style, curated by the Library System of the University of Bologna, can be useful for the scientific community. It provides a wealth of examples for numerous types of sources.
For users of the SNS Library there is also a complete printed version of the 17th edition (2017) of the CMoS. 

Harvard Format Citation Guide 
Complete guide available free of charge at the Mendeley site.

Harvard Reference Quick Guide 
An easy online guide curated by the Dundalk Institute of Technology (Ireland).

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Reference Guide 
A guide focussing on the types of source particularly searched in the scientific field of reference: datasets, conference proceedings, patents and lectures.

Modern Language Association Citation 8 guide 
This guide in English, with its wealth of examples for various types of source, is available free of charge on the Mendeley site and refers to the eighth edition (2016) of the MLA style manual.

MLA Style Center 
The Modern Language Association makes freely available on its portal the FAQs on the use of its citational style and a synthetic guide: Works Cited: A Quick Guide, with examples.

Nature Referencing Guide  
Online guide with examples.

Open University Classical Studies guide to referencing 
Compiled by a British research university specialising in distance teaching, this online guide can be useful to antiquarians for the citation, in a correct way but limited to the citations within the text, of primary sources of antiquity (texts, artifacts, artworks, coins, inscriptions and papyri).  

University of Pittsburgh - Courses & subject guides - Citation Styles 
This complete guide of examples contains the citational styles most widely used in the academic context: APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, IEEE.

Western Sidney University Harvard Reference Style Guide 
A complete guide on the Harvard style in text format.

We also mention the following resources, available in the Library or accessible on the SNS network:

Harvey Gordon, Writing with sources : a guide for students. Third ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017. <https://tinyurl.com/mwhen82m>  
(eBooks with reserved access on the SNS network) 
Paintings, letters, video clips, radio recordings, blog items, reviews of a discontinued journal or the statistical data recorded by a seismic detector: these are all examples of sources. How can you manage them in your publication? This e-book by Gordon Harvey, distinguishing between primary sources (factual data) and secondary ones (ideal data), explains how to assess the reliability of a source and how to manage it in your publication so as to increase its authority. The appendix includes many examples for citing a source using differing styles (MLA, Chicago, APA and others). 

Pensato Rino, Corso di bibliografia: guida alla compilazione e all'uso dei repertori bibliografici. Milano: Editrice bibliografica, 1987 
This manual (in Italian) arose out of a university bibliography course given by the author and thus it is directed first and foremost to students of disciplines of the book who will find in it theoretical and technical-methodological references; however, the paragraphs dedicated to the choice and limitation of the subject, title search, citation style, annotation, organisation and methods of ordering may be of use to a wider public.

Revelli Carlo, La citazione bibliografica. Roma: AIB, 2010. 
A synthetic publication (in Italian) dealing with the elements useful for the construction of a solid and coherent bibliographical apparatus: the footnote, the elements of the bibliographical citation, the succession of the elements in the bibliographical citation, the ordering of the bibliographical citations, the author-date citations and the digital documents. With examples.

Turabian Kate L., A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations: Chicago Style for students and researchers. 9 ed. Revised by Wayne C. Booth ... [et al.]. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018 
In the Reference Room of the Orologio-Carovana site in Pisa there is a copy of the ninth edition of this extremely widely used manual, known simply as "Turabian". Based on the Chicago style, it simplifies the structure thereof, and is mainly aimed at satisfying the needs of university students, who, after a section dedicated to the writing of a scientific text, can find the pages dedicated to the Turabian citational style. Two styles are presented: Notes bibliography, more widely used in the field of the human and social sciences, and Author-date, in which the more prominent position given to the date of publication of the research is more suitable for the demands of the pure and applied sciences. Examples relating to the modalities of citations in the text, the ordering of the elements and the structure of the final bibliography are provided for various types of source, with particular attention devoted to online resources and the new media.