The Author/Date citation system – a short summary
Adapted from The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press 2003, 616624) by David Clowney
August, 2012
When you write academic papers, you are required to say where you got any words
or ideas that are not your very own original contributions, unless they are common
knowledge. Doing this is called citing your sources. Not doing it is called plagiarism.
There are several accepted ways of citing sources. The standards of the Modern
Language Association (MLA) and the American Psychological Association (APA) are
just two examples. I will accept any of these standard systems. The system I use is
called the Author/Date system. It is common in the sciences, and has recently
become popular in many humanities disciplines as well. If you don’t already have a
standard system that you’re used to, I recommend it to you.
The author/date citation system has several advantages both for authors and
readers. It is a lot more efficient than other systems. It doesn’t rely on little known
Latin abbreviations that are hard to keep straight. It tells readers right away, in the
body of the text, where a particular idea or quotation comes from, and saves
footnotes and endnotes for additional content that doesn’t belong in the text itself.
All citation systems have the same purpose. They locate your academic writing
within the scholarly world on which it depends and with which it is in conversation.
They help an interested reader know where to find what you are citing, so she can
learn more, form her own ideas about the evidence, fact-check you, and in general
do more than just take your word for things. They also keep you honest, by obliging
you to credit the source for any words or ideas you use that are not either common
knowledge or your very own original contribution. Finally, they force you as an
author to be very careful about attributing words and ideas to someone else unless
you can prove the person actually said those words and has those ideas. Proper
citation trains you to be a much more accurate reporter and interpreter of other
people’s work than you otherwise would be.
Once you get used to using a citation system correctly, you will start noticing the
differences between different systems. Settle on one academically standard system
that you prefer, and use it consistently when you have the choice. But be prepared to
adapt to different systems in different contexts. Different professors may require
you to use different systems. And if you go on to publish in academic journals, or do
any other sort of professional writing, you will find that different journals and
publishers have different stylebooks. Check their “Instructions for Authors” page
before you submit something for publication, and format your submission to match
their requirements. Knowing one system will help you notice how theirs differs
from yours.
Here’s my version of the author/date system.
General principles of the author/date system of citation:
1. Every citation has two parts.
a. The reference list gives the full bibliographic details for each work
cited: see below for what it should look like. It comes at the end of
your paper, with a heading like “References” or “Sources Cited”.
b. In the body of the paper, each time you cite a work, you should
include a parenthetical pointer to the references page, consisting of
the author’s last name, the date of the publication you’re pointing to,
and in most cases the specific pages to which you are referring. Again,
see below for what this looks like. A citation is not complete unless
both parts are present.
2. In the author/date system, footnotes and endnotes are never used for
citations. Use them only for material you want to include, but don’t want
to put in the main body of the paper.
3. The author/date system of citation is the norm in the sciences and the social
sciences, but is gaining popularity in the humanities (e.g., in philosophy).
When used in the humanities, it often appears in a hybrid form. Thus, full
names of authors usually appear in the reference list, whereas the
sciences and social sciences often give only the last name and initials.
When this system is used in the humanities, titles of books often appear
in italics, and titles of articles in quotation marks, and both are capitalized
in headline style, where science publications customarily don’t use
quotation marks for any titles, use italics only for journal titles, and
capitalize both book and article titles in sentence style. Finally, page
numbers are more likely to be used in humanities citations than in
science citations (partly because humanities publications are much
longer, on average, than science papers, and the humanities pay more
attention to the way things are said). Don’t obsess about these details;
pick a variant that makes sense to you and use it consistently. The
examples below are in the hybrid style that I use.
Specific details of the author/date system:
The first half of the system: In the reference list, use the following
conventions:
Book (three examples – a book with a single author, a translated and revised work,
and a work authored by an institution with no individual author or editor listed):
Shiner, Larry. 2001. The Invention of Art: a Cultural History. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Plato, G.M.A. Grube trans., J. M. Cooper rev. 2002. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology,
Crito, Meno, Phaedo, 2nd edition. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.
University of Chicago Press. 2003. The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Notice my use of “trans.” for “translator” and “rev.” for “reviser”. You could also spell
these out; it’s your choice, just be consistent.
Journal article:
Geach, P.T. 1966. “Plato’s Euthyphro: an Analysis and Commentary.” Monist 50:36982.
Citation from a web-page:
Frede, Dorothea. 2009. “Plato’s Ethics: An Overview.” Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Summer 2009 edition), Edward N. Zalta ed.
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/plato-ethics/.
Accessed August 30, 2012.
Note: this source includes a guide for citing it, and as a peer-reviewed online
academic source it is very careful about this. Many internet sources are not. But
even this source does not have page numbers, so if you need to cite a particular
passage in a long entry, use the entry’s section numbers as locators in place of page
numbers.
Citation of a personal conversation:
You may have gotten your idea from a friend, or from an interview of some expert.
You may simply mention this in your text, or you may cite it like this: (John Brody,
personal communication, October 2012). You could include this in the references
page or only in the body of the text. The Chicago manual tilts in the direction of
handling such communications informally, but gives methods for citing them. The
basic principle still applies: everything that is not your own original words and ideas,
and is not common knowledge, needs to be attributed to the source from which you
got it!
Other cases:
There are a great many of these, including television shows, radio broadcasts, CD’s,
mp3 files, YouTube videos, tweets, political speeches, . . . the list goes on. Do your
best! If you don’t know what to do, look it up in the Chicago Manual of Style. If you
still don’t know what to do, ask! In most of my classes, I only care about the main
principle, namely crediting all your sources, and tying them to the actual place in
your paper where you are using them. Don’t obsess, do your best.
The second half of the system: In the body of the text, use the following
conventions:
Citing a work as a whole:
Larry Shiner argues that the term “art” as we now use it refers to a system of
practices, institutions and concepts that was invented in the 18th century
west (Shiner 2001).
Citing a particular location in a work: follow the author and date with a comma and
the page number(s). E.g., (Shiner 2001, 25-33). If there are no page numbers (as is
the case for many web-pages), and the reader might have a hard time finding the
passage you’re citing, mention whatever location markers may be present (e.g.,
section numbers, subheadings, even nearby images, or if all else fails, approximate
locators like “about two-thirds of the way through the article”).
Classic texts in translation often have standard location markers in the margins
(these are usually tied to locations in standard critical editions of the original text).
When you are citing such a text, you may substitute these location markers for the
standard parenthetical mini-citation in the body of your text, like this (Euthyphro
6c). This is the only exception I know to the standard practice for the author date
system. You should still include the full citation for the translation or edition you are
using in your reference list, so that readers will know what translation or edition
you are using.
Footnotes and endnotes in the author/date system:
In this system, as previously noted, you don’t use notes to cite sources. But you
might cite a source in a note. If you do that, treat the citation the same way you
would in the body of the text. Use an abbreviated parenthetical pointer (Author Date,
pp.) and include the full bibliographic citation in the reference list.