Documentation of sources is a critical part of preparing a research project. A responsible researcher will provide his or her readers with a list of all sources referenced in the project and will provide in-text documentation of all ideas that are not original.

Following are some general guidelines for what types of information to record as you use sources in a project. Your sources may include books, videos, recordings, articles, even interviews. What to document varies from source to source, but it is better to err on the side of overdocumenting rather than to incompletely document or not document a source.

Definitions/Abbreviations

APA: American Psychological Association.
Article: Articles are normally published in magazines, journals, and newspapers, and typically focus on current topics in a specific area. For example, the magazine Newsweek features articles on current newsworthy topics on a weekly basis.
Author: The person who actually wrote an article or book. This may at times even be a corporation, an association, or a government body. For example, the United States Department of Labor is often credited as author of many government documents.  
Bibliographic Citation: A standard reference to an information source that provides basic information necessary for locating the information again. This typically includes author's name, title of the source, periodical title (if the source is an article in a periodical), publication date, publisher, etc. The information varies according to the type of source. The various style guides set standards for each type of source to be referenced.  
Bibliographic Style: A formal set of guidelines for preparing a bibliography.  
Bibliography: An alphabetically arranged listing of sources of information on a subject. A typical bibliography is arranged by author's last name or by title if an author is not given for a source. A bibliography may include periodical articles, books, videotapes, government documents, almost any type of information source that provides subject information.
Book: Books are typically fairly lengthy written works that explore various topics in much greater depth than in an article. Books that are based on research typically will reference other books and a multitude of articles covering various aspects of the topic.
Chicago: This refers to the Chicago Manual of Style.  
Compiler: The person who collected information to be included in a published work. For example, a collection of quotes from different authors would be considered a compilation. The selector and organizer would be considered the compiler.
Corporate Author: When a book or article is prepared by an organization, by a company, or by a government body, the group that prepared the publication is referred to as a corporate author.
Editor: The person who selected and commented on materials to be included in a collected work or the person who worked with the author of a work in preparing it for publication. The editor may also make written contributions to the article or book, but typically plays more of an advisory role in the preparation.
Government Document: Any publication by a government agency or department is typically referred to as a government document. Some documents may be as brief as one page, while other may be multiple hundreds of pages long.
Journal: A professional publication focussing on a specific subject area. Most professional associations publish one or more journals that document their activities and offer experts in the field an arena to air discussions and to publish results of their ongoing researches. Journals vary in frequency of publication, but typically are monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual publications.
Magazine: A magazine, unlike a journal, is geared toward the lay reader, rather than toward a group of experts. Articles in a magazine aren't usually appropriate for academic research because of the general nature, but they may offer good starting places for a researcher who is trying to identify a topic to work with.
MLA: Modern Language Association.
Monograph: Any non-serial publication, but, more specifically, a book-length, thoroughly researched, single work that focusses on a specific subject in great detail. Books may frequently be referred to as monographs, but the term is more accurately attributed to scholarly books that have as their focus a single subject.
Periodical: A regularly published collection of articles, reviews, stories and other types of short works by a variety of authors. Periodicals are usually very regular in frequency (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annually) and follow a designated publication schedule. Magazines and journals are probably the most recognized types of periodicals.
Publishing Information: Includes place of publication, name of the publishing company, and year of publication.
Serial: A publication that is issued in parts and that is planned as an ongoing, continuous publication. Serials include periodicals, annuals, and other regularly issued publications, and may include monographs that are issued in numbers.
Turabian: This refers to Kate Turabian's Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.

---

For publishing guidelines used by professional organizations, consult the organization's journal(s). Many professional journals will provide manuscript preparation guidelines in the beginning pages of each issue of their journals.

What To Document -- General Guidelines

One of the purposes behind documenting sources in a bibliography is to provide other researchers who take an interest in the results of your research a means of finding and reading the same materials that you used. The research process depends heavily on scholars and investigators sharing their information sources and discoveries as a means of promoting further investigation and progress. Not providing adequate documentation or providing no documentation at all thwarts the entire process.

Another practical reason for being careful with documenting sources is to avoid claims of plagiarism. Plagiarism is the intentional use of another person's original ideas and language and claiming them as one's own. If you have thoroughly documented the sources of your background information, then you are unlikely to be accused of academic theft.

In short, careful documentation of sources is a responsible and prudent thing to do.

The basic elements necessary for providing adequate documentation for a book are author name(s), book title, place of publication, publishing company, and publication date. Almost all books will easily provide you with this information in the first few pages of the book. If you have found the book using a library catalog, you will find that the catalog description of the book also provides you with this information.

Some books are not written by a single author, so you will need to document all the authors involved in the writing of the book. Most style manuals provide means for shortening the citation if there are many authors for one book. One of the most common ways is to show the first author's name followed by the Latin abbreviation et al., which is short for et alia (in English, and others). Some books are actually collections of shorter articles by multiple authors that have been gathered together by an editor or group of editors because the articles all focus on a central theme. In this case, you will likely need to document who the editors are and possibly even cite the individual chapters (articles) and the individual chapter or article authors. For very intricate situations like this, always consult a style manual.

Basic Book Information

Author's or Authors' Names

Title

Place of Publication

Publisher's Name

Date of Publication

Electronic Journal or Magazine Citations 

Some journals actually publish articles by contributing researchers directly on the Internet. The articles may be accessible either for free or for a subscription charge. In either case, the required information for documenting an article differs little from the documentation required for an article published in a print journal.

Take note of the author's name, the title of the article, the title of the journal, the date of the journal issue, and any volume and issue numbering provided. While print journals and magazines will provide page numbers, page numbers won't be available for electronic journals, unless they are provided in pdf (Acrobat) format. In addition to the foregoing information, take note of the URL (Internet address) of the journal article and the date that you viewed the article (in case the journal ceases and disappears from the Internet).

Electronic publications present special problems for documentation because Web sites may disappear suddenly and leave no forwarding information. For this reason, always record as much information as possible and the date that the document (or site) was last available. That's the best you can do (unfortunately). Fortunately, most academic journals that continue to be supported by their professional constituency will be around for quite some time.

Basic Electronic Journal Article Information

Author's or Authors' Names

Article Title

Electronic Journal Title

Journal Volume Number

Journal Issue Number

Journal Date

URL (Web address)

Date Visited

Government Documents 

City, state, and federal government agencies are prolific publishers. Their publications are typically known as government documents. Documentation for government publications follows the guidelines used typically for books: author's name, title, place of publication, publisher, date. Often the author may be an agency or department of the city, state, or federal government. In that case, list the department or agency as the author, just as you would for a book.

As with other types of materials, copy down all the information you can find in the document's first few pages and you will likely have everything you need to document it properly in your bibliography.

Basic Government Document Information

Author's or Authors' Names

Title

Place of Publication

Publisher's Name

Date of Publication

Journal Articles

One of the most frequently cited types of sources in academic research, journal articles typically reflect and detail current developments in research being done in all academic disciplines. Professional and academic journals make it their business to provide other researchers access to their colleagues' discoveries in regularly published titles in a multitude of disciplines. When documenting journal articles, be certain to keep track of authors' names, article titles, journal titles, volume numbers, issue numbers, dates (month, year, sometimes day), and pages. You may not need all these details, depending on the style of documentation, but it certainly won't hurt to save the information, just in case.

Basic Journal Article Information

Author's or Authors' Names

Article Title

Journal Title

Journal Volume Number

Journal Issue Number

Journal Date

Article Page Numbers

Magazine Articles

While magazine articles are not used as frequently for academic research, they can often be useful for some research projects. For example, if you were researching how articles in women's magazines have changed over the past 25 years, you would need to document sources like Ladies Home Journal and Redbook and Southern Living. These publications may list volume numbers and issue numbers, but most citation styles only require the basic elements for a complete citation: author's name, article title, magazine title, issue date, and page numbers.You may find variations on these requirements, so the best thing to do is to save all the available information on the article, including volume number and issue number. Check your style guide to find out what is actually required.

Basic Magazine Article Information

Author's or Authors' Names

Article Title

Magazine Title

Magazine Issue Date (month, day, year)

Article Page Numbers

Newspaper Articles

The basic elements necessary to provide a bibliographic citation for a newspaper article are author name(s) (if listed), article headline, newspaper title, issue date, and page(s). If the paper publishes in sections labeled with letters or with Roman numerals, include the letters or numerals as part of the page numbers. For example, for a newspaper that has Sections A, B, C, etc., list page 13 found in section C as C13. 

Basic Newspaper Article Information

Author's or Authors' Name(s) (if given)

Article Title or Headline

Newspaper Title

Newspaper Date

Section and Page Numbers

Sound Recordings

Information documented for recordings can vary depending on whether you are using an individual song from an album, an individual performance of a piece of music from an album, or the entire album as your focus in your research In any case, the essential information to document includes album title, artist's name (or, if multiple artists, all the names), recording company, and date. If the album is a compilation of music from a variety of artists and you are referencing a performance of a particular song by a single artist, you should include the artist's name and the song title as part of your reference. You may also need to document where the recording company is located for some styles. The more information you identify in your notes, the better, in so far as your bibliography is concerned.

Basic Sound Recording Information

Artist's or Artists' Name(s)

Album Title

Recording Company

Date

Videos

When documenting videos, identify the title of the video, the director, the producer, the production company, and the date. Some styles will also require your providing the location of the production company. If the screenwriter is important in your research, then you should identify the screenwriter as part of your documentation. If the video is being used as an example of a particular technical aspect of film-making, then take care to document who the technicians were in producing the film. As with any source used in a research project, collect as many details as possible on who was responsible for the creation of the work and when it was created.

Basic Video Information

Director's Name

Producer's Name

Video Title

Production Company

Date

Web Pages 

Basic rules for citing print sources apply also to Internet documents. Always provide as much bibliographic information as possible, including author's name, title of the document, type of medium, document date, and availability. In addition to this basic information, include the date the document was last visited.

Web pages can be particularly problematic because of the very fluid nature of the Web. As long as you provide a complete title for the page you have visited, any author and sponsoring information that was available, and some indication of the last known Web address, one or more of the currently available Web search services will provide a link to the source, even if it has been relocated.

Basic Web Page Information

Author's or Authors' Names

Web Page Title

Date of Last Update

URL (Web Address)

Date Visited

RefWorks

RefWorks is an online citation manager that allows registered researchers to gather references for articles, books, Web pages, and other materials directly from research databases, to store the references in customized search folders on the RefWorks server, and to automatically format saved references in any of more than 100 bibliographic styles, including APA, MLA, Turabian, and Chicago. UNF Library subscribes to RefWorks as a service to its students, faculty, and staff, but individuals not affiliated with UNF may subscribe directly.

RefWorks works directly with a number of commonly used database systems, including CSA (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts), FirstSearch, and ProQuest, and can import saved citations from many other databases. The beauty of the system is that a researcher can work on a project over several weeks, file article and book citations away in a specific folder in RefWorks, and, when ready, automatically generate an alphabetized bibliography of all the saved citations in any of the supported bibliographic formats.

For more information and to sign up for a RefWorks account courtesy of the UNF Library, link here.

Thomas G. Carpenter Library Citation Guide

The Carpenter Library maintains a brief guide to bibliographic citations on its Web site. The guide provides sample citations for some of the most commonly referenced materials, including books, magazine articles, journal articles, newspaper articles, government documents, personal interviews, and Web pages. A number of variations are shown for each type of material in both APA and MLA styles.

Link directly to the Citation Guide here. (Note: the guide is in pdf (Acrobat) format, so you will need the free Adobe Reader in order to view it. Download Acrobat here.)

Page updated 11/08.