Citing For a History Paper By Tony Bridges

Why Cite?

Documenting your work is often the most irritating part of any assignment for students, whether it is writing your work in mathematics, commenting your code in programming, or citing your sources for your term paper. Citations are about a lot more than mere busywork, however. First, and most importantly, it gives credit where credit is due. When you write a research paper, you are standing on the shoulders of those that came before you, and they deserve to be recognized for that, just as you deserve to be recognized by those that use your own work. They are also a resource for researchers that come after you. Future researchers need to be able to confirm your research before they base their own work on your conclusions. Also, it speaks to your own credibility. Simply put, a research paper without citations has no way of proving that it's anything more than fantasy. The more specific, legitimate citations that you use, the more credible you appear to an educated reader.

Type of Citation

So how do you go about citing properly? First and foremost, if you are writing for a specific teacher, editor or department, ask them. In general, however, history citations are in Chicago or Turabian style, with footnotes or endnotes. What does all that mean?

There are several styles of citation floating around, and different industries use different formats. The most
popular is MLA, or Modern Language Association, which is used by most English departments, and many others. There is also the APA format, or American Psychological Association which I see primarily in medical and business communities. History, however, typically uses the Chicago or Turabian style. Chicago style is a very detailed system of formatting that covers citation, punctuation, grammar and many other writing topics. It is contained in a very large document called the Chicago Manual of Style that runs into many hundreds of pages. For ease of use, Kate Turabian wrote A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, which I highly recommend. It is a condensed and much easier to use form of the Chicago Manual of Style, with very few changes, that still manages to cover the most important aspects of writing. What's all this mean to you? It means that when a teacher asks for Chicago style, you can use Turabian, and vice versa. They're not quite identical, but they're interchangeable for citation purposes.

What about footnotes or end notes? Citations come in three flavors: parenthetical, footnotes and endnotes. Parenthetical citations are inserted directly into the text, in parentheses. They look like this (Bridges, 2009). A footnote is a citation at the bottom of a page, and end notes are citations accumulated at the end of a text. Both are denoted in the text by a superscript number. Footnotes are generally used for essays, and endnotes are generally used for chapters in books and articles in periodicals. The choice is an aesthetic one. Footnotes and endnotes are easily created in most modern word processors. In Microsoft Word, go to Insert>Reference>Footnote. This will automatically insert a superscript number at the cursor, and a space in the appropriate location for your citation.

Citation Format
The citation itself, for a book, will follow the format

Author. Title (Publisher location: Publisher name, Publisher date), page number.

Important notes: Author names are first name first, unlike bibliographies or works cited. There is no punctuation after the title. There is a period at the end. All of these little details can lose you points on a graded work. All this information should be in the first few pages of the book. If any of this information is not available, skip that section.

Here is an example: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), 126.

If there is an editor listed, after the author's name put ed. Editor's Name. If it's not a book, but an article,
put the title in quotes instead of in italics, and follow with the title of the publication, in italics. Follow
that by vol. or issue, as appropriate, and the volume or issue number. For a complete listing of all possible types of citation, peruse Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers, or google Chicago citation format.

Shortened citations

After the first time a work has been cited, you do not have to write all that all over again. If a citation is from the same work as the last citation you used, and for footnotes, is on the same page, simply write ibid, page number. Otherwise, use a shortened form of citation. The preferred shortened citation is the author's last name, followed by a clear but shortened version of the title, and then the page number, in the format Name. Title, page number. However, if only one work by the other is cited in your work, you can usually get away with just the last name and the page number.

The Easy Way

I include all the above information because it is important, if not vital, to know all of this as a history student, yet I've seen even Masters degree students who couldn't follow these rules. That said, is this what I do? Not usually. The easiest way to do citations is to use an online citation generator, such as bibme.org. These sometimes require an account, but should not require fees. The better ones will have a database of works you can choose from to auto fill information.

The Bottom Line

If you are ever confused with a particular citation, or are unsure if you've included enough information, ask
yourself if someone completely unfamiliar with the work could use your citation to find exactly where you drew your facts from. That, after all, is the purpose of all the information in a citation, and conveying that is more important than following a particular style.

Unless, of course, your teacher disagrees.

About the Author:
Tony Bridges is an historian and author with a wide variety of interests. He has dedicated his research to telling the life stories of individuals to the greatest detail available from the historical record. He has written life stories from such overpublished giants as Louis XIV, and front-line nobodies like Confederate soldier James Beard and Korean War Infantryman Howard Spencer. Read more from Tony Bridges at his website http://TBridges.110mb.com