Comments on: Citation Style Hell

By: Dan - That One

Dan - That One — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 00:24:11 +0000

There was an interesting presentation at SUNYLA about the errors in database help files regarding citation. It’d have been stronger if they’d looked at more than the present style manuals (to see if the changes were due to updates or just carelessness), and it didn’t look at whether people were actually reading the damn files to begin with, which I seriously doubt they do. The point is telling nonetheless – even those who are supposed to be guiding the process don’t get it right, style manuals are confusing to use, and even professors who insist on a particular style are really using some weird hybrid version that they expect students to use.

Frankly, I think the whole thing is ridiculous. We already have hyperlinks, and the majority of material that’s cited is available in electronic form anyway. In ten years, if resources like Google’s Scholar services and web archives develop in the logical manner, all you’ll have to do is click on a reference if you want it, making these questions of proper formatting, underlining, and location of commas irrelevant. Bye-bye, MLA, APA, Chicago, Turabian! I know I won’t miss you.

By: Tate

Tate — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:05:10 +0000

For electronic references/citations, it seems that including an OpenURL link would be the most obvious solution to providing an easy way to access the source material. Assuming that a link resolver is being maintained it becomes a fairly persistent reference.

For blogs, perhaps a permalink or other PURL could be incorporated into the citation style.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 17:03:01 +0000

Whilst not addressing the problems associated with citing web resources, etc, the “my list” function on redlightgreen ( http://www.redlightgreen.com ) does a pretty good job of taking the sting out of doing all that formatting: one assembles a bibliography and RLG will format it in various ways, with, regrettably, the usual holes for different roles played by contributors under some citation systems. A spot of cutting and pasting later and… whoom! Bibliography!

RLG seems a decent way to keep a bibliography on the fly, with, perhaps a wee bit of extra functionality and library-based goodness compared to the surf-stuff-and-tag-for-later-in-del.icio.us route. Although delicious/spurl/furl and the gang do archive those web sources better. What we need is some glue to bring the two together.

By: Andrew Houghton

Andrew Houghton — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 02:30:19 +0000

Have you looked at NISO Z39.29-2005 as a model for a blog citation? It doesn’t specifically have a format for blog, but it would fall under Electronic Information Formats section. It’s possible that you could model one after the sub-section Home Pages — Parts of Home Pages.