These are answers to questions I have been asked about citation following the library tutorial. Please feel free to ask more questions below and I will include answers here.
1a) What counts as an online source?
- online primary sources (through reputable sites like Internet Medieval Sourcebook)
- online journal articles
- online books (eg. via the library)
- online images (make sure you understand what they are/where & when they come from)
1b) What doesn't count as an online source?
- Wikipedia
- any secondary sources that are not peer reviewed (blogs, newspaper opinion, documentaries)
- in fact, the peer review criterion also applies to secondary sources in print!
2) How should one cite information obtained from a citation in another source?
- This is called secondary citation. In general I am not a fan. Where possible I expect you to go back to the original source. However, when absolutely necessary:
- In your text indicate that you are making reference to an author whose work you haven't read, for example: Rodinelli, cited in Potts, describes the stages of a project... .1Then in your footnote, provide the details of the book you actually read (i.e. Potts). This reference should also then be listed in your bibliography.This advice comes from the Cardiff University Information Literacy Resource Book
4) Your bibliographyshould have separate subheadings for primary and secondary sources. Sort alphabetically within each section.
5) Some instructions about using Word for essays, inserting footnotes, etc.:
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10 comments:
Hi Kathleen. In the ‘Essay Writing’ link on the blog, under the lecturer's advice regarding quoting secondary sources, it says that it is appropriate when it is a broad statement of interpretation, not just for information purposes. In some other subjects, they actively discourage or mark down for directly quoting secondary sources. What is your view on this? Would an essay be marked down for not directly quoting a secondary source? (Just to be clear, I am not including primary sources or referencing secondary sources, just direct quotes from secondary sources). Thanks.
Hi Catherine. My advice would be to use direct quotation from secondary sources extremely sparingly and to avoid it where possible. It should normally be fairly easy to paraphrase the main point, and just cite the secondary source in a footnote. The guiding principle is to use the essay as far as possible to make your own argument from the primary sources. Secondary sources are merely butressing, not 'evidence' per se, so they get low priority for quoting.
Thanks Kathleen. I just have (hopefully!) one more question: with the bibliography, does it need to be separated between primary (historical) and secondary (modern) sources, or does it just go in one list, alphabetically?
Thanks for reminding me to mention this. Yes: primary and secondary sources should be separated in the bibliography; sorted alphabetically within each category.
Thanks for that. Could you please also clarify if the word limit is 1750 words, plus or minus ten per cent? Sorry for all the questions, but it’s been a while since I used anything besides the Harvard system.
Yes - word limits (at least in SOPHIS) generally allow a maximum 10% leeway.
For this task the limit is 1750 words (+/- 10%) not including footnotes and bibliography.
Hi all,
Just alerting you to the queries page where I have added some new information about using Word. Students in some of my classes needed advice on how to insert footnotes, etc., and it may also be useful to you!
I've had a query about citing Black Death primary sources in the reader. This is a bit of an unusual situation because those final few primary sources in the reader have apparently been used in this unit for so many years that no one remembers the original publication details! (Whoops!) In this case, cite it using the format for a book chapter or section, where the "chapter" author and details relate to the primary text, and the "book" title and details relate to the reader itself. That's as close as you can get in this instance to the correct format.
For material on DVD:
If it's a film, the reference should include, as a minimum, title, director, distributor, date, and format, e.g.:
The Grapes of Wrath, dir. by John Ford (20th Century Fox, 1940) [on DVD].
If it has a serial/product/recording number, it goes in the backets between the distributor and the year.
If it's a book or similar material published on DVD/CD-ROM, cite it as a normal book (or similar) and add "[on DVD]" or "[on CD]" after the round brackets, as above, and before any page reference.
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