Writing With Sources PDF

Writing with Sources

A Guide for Harvard Students
Gordon Harvey
Expository Writing Program
Copyright 1995
The President and Fellows of Harvard University
Contents
List of Text Boxes
Preface
Acknowledgements
Common Questions about Sources
Introduction
1. Integrating Sources into a Paper
1.1 Three Basic Principles
1.2 Rules for Quoting
1.3 Quoting Blocks
1.4 Using Discursive Notes
2. Citing Sources
2.1 When to Cite
2.2 When Not to Cite
2.3 Methods of Citing
2.4 Acknowledging Uncited Sources
3. Misuse of Sources
3.1 Plagiarism
3.2 Other Ways of Misusing Sources
3.3 Disciplinary Consequences
3.4 How to Avoid High-Risk Situations
Appendix A Placing Citations in your Paper
1. Footnote or endnote style
2. In-text style for the humanities
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3. In-text style for the social sciences and sciences

4. Coding style for the sciences
Appendix B Formatting References
1. Basic sources and variants
2. Other articles and short items
3. Other books
4. Other sources
Appendix C Further Information
List of Text Boxes

Mentioning a Title in your Paper
Ellipsis
Quoting or Citing a Source you Found Quoted or Cited
Abbreviated Citation for Frequently Used Sources
Avoid All-But Quoting
If You Encounter "Your" Idea in a Source
Citing Electronic Media
Preface
This booklet is designed to be studied in your Expository Writing course and consulted as necessary
when you write papers or do other assignments using sources. Some students will have been trained in
writing with sources before coming to Harvard; others will have had little or no training. The booklet
aims to help both groups. Without a grasp of the information it contains, you risk taking valuable time
away from the creative process of writing a paper and in certain circumstances could face disciplinary
action. Even if you believe you already understand when and how to cite sources, you should compare
your understanding with the instructions that follow. Your Expository Writing instructor will sup-
plement them with examples and exercises. Don't hesitate to ask about rules or situations that are unclear
to you, since they may come up again in other classes or in the rumored life after Harvard.
Acknowledgments

Expository Writing gratefully acknowledges the support of the Otto C. Fuerbringer Fund in the
development and production of this booklet. Thanks also to those who read drafts of the booklet or gave
advice: Lawrence Buell, Elizabeth Doherty, Stephen Donatelli, John Dowling, Peter Ellison, Patrick
Ford, David Gewanter, Michael Hagen, Dudley Hershbach, Mark Kishlansky Stephen Kosslyn, Susan
Lewis, Harry Lewis, Abigail Lifson, Sue Lonoff, Garth McCavana, Barry Mazur, Greg Mobley,
Gregory Nagy, Suzi Naiburg, Elizabeth Studley Nathans, J. D. Paul, Henriette Lazaridis Power, Sheila
Reindl, William Rice, Ed Tallent, Nancy Sommers, Donald Stone, Janice Thaddeus, Mary Waters,
James Wilkinson.

INTEGRATING SOURCESINTO A PAPER
INTEGRATING SOURCES
INTO A PAPER
1.1 Three Basic Principles
A source can appear in your paper in different ways. You can briefly mention it; you can summarize its
main ideas, events, or data; you can paraphrase one of its statements or passages; or you can quote the
source directly. Let three principles govern your thinking about these options.
FIRST PRINCIPLE: Use sources as concisely as possible, so your own thinking isn't crowded out by
your presentation of other people's thinking, or your own voice by your quoting of other voices. This
means that you should mention or summarize your source, perhaps quoting occasional phrases, unless
you have a good reason to paraphrase closely or quote extensively.
A good reason to paraphrase-to restate in your own words the full meaning of a phrase or passageÑis if
the phrase or passage is difficult, complex, or ambiguous. Unlike a summary, which reduces a text or
passage to its gist, a paraphrase is as long or lo nger than the passage paraphrased. Think of how many
words you would use unpacking the meaning of "a stitch in time saves nine." Another reason to
paraphrase is to avoid using, in a summary, the same phrases your source doesÑto avoid plagiarizing
(see section 3.1d). You need to put the phrases into your own words: to change the language and alter
the structure of the sentence, or else to quote. Good reasons to quote include the following:
● The source author has made a point so clearly and concisely that it can't be expressed more
clearly and concisely.
● A certain phrase or sentence in the source is particularly vivid or striking, or especially typical or
representative of some phenomenon you are discussing.
● An important passage is sufficiently difficult, dense, or rich that it requires you to analyze it
closely, which in turn requires that the passage be produced so the reader can follow your
analysis.
● A claim you are making is such that the doubting reader will want to hear exactly what the source
said. This will often be the case when you criticize or disagree with a source; your reader wants
to feel sure you aren't misrepresenting the sourceÑare n't creating a straw man (or woman). And
you need to quote enough of the source so the context and meaning are clear.
SECOND PRINCIPLE: Never leave your reader in doubt as to when you are speaking and when you
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are using materials from a source. Avoid this ambiguity by citing the source immediately after using it,
but also (especia lly when quoting directly) by announcing the source in your own sentence or phrases
preceding its appearance and by following up its appearance with commentary about it or development
from it that makes clear where your contribution starts. Although you d on't need to restate the name of
your source where it's obviousÑcertainly not in every sentenceÑif your summary of a source continues
for many sentences, you should remind your reader that you are still summarizing, not interpreting or
developing.
THIRD PRINCIPLE: Always make clear how each source you use relates to your argument. This
means indicating to your reader, in the words leading up to a source's appearance or in the sentences that
follow and reflec t on it (or in both), what you want your reader to notice or focus on in the source.
Notice how the student writer indicates this in the following excerpt, from a paper analyzing why people
engage in self-destructive behaviors like smoking and drinking:
1 Scientists distinguish between "proximate" and "ultimate"

2 explanations (Bell 600). An ultimate, long-range explanation of
3 smoking, based on a study of human evolution, has greater appeal
for
4 many people than a proximate explanation--like chemical changes in
the
5 body or an oral fixation. But ultimate explanations may conflict
with
6 proximate evidence that seems more obvious, as does the explanation
7 proposed by physiologist Jared Diamond in his recent book The
Third
8 Chimpanzee. Diamond cites the theory of zoologist Amotz Zahavi
that
9 self-endangering behaviors in animals (such as a male bird
displaying
10 a big tail and a loud song to a female) may be at once a signal
and a
11 proof of superior powers (196). Such a bird has proved, writes
12 Diamond, "that he must be especially good at escaping predators,
13 finding food, resisting disease; the bigger the handicap, the more
14 rigorous the test he has passed." Humans share the same instinct
that
15 makes birds give dangerous displays, he suggests; and risky human
16 actions, including the use of drugs, are designed to impress
potential
17 mates and competitors in the way Zahavi suggests risky animal
actions
18 are (198). Diamond's characterization of the message that
teenagers

19 send by smoking and drinking creates an image of a strutting

animal:
20 I'm strong and I'm superior. Even to take drugs once or

21 twice, I must be strong enough to get past the burning,
22 choking sensation of my first puff on a cigarette, or to ge
23 past the misery of my first hangover. To do it chronically
24 and remain alive and healthy, I must be superior. (199)
25 An apparent problem with this ultimate, evolutionary explanation of

26 smoking, however, is that people were smoking long before they
knew it
27 was dangerous, before they knew that doing it chronically made it
28 harder to "remain alive and healthy." Public concern about smoking
did
29 not appear until the 1950s (Schmidt 29). Before that, moreover,
many
30 people smoked in private--removed from potential mates they might
31 impress; men had a quiet pipe by the fire or actually left the
ladies
32 (or the ladies left them)to have a cigar after dinner. Finally,
Native
33 American peoples smoked tobacco for centuries, apparently for its
34 pleasantly elevating effect (Wills 77).
The student uses her sources concisely and clearly. She summarizes, in passing, Bell's distinction
between types of explanation, which she accepts and applies to her own topic. She reduces Diamond's
10-page argument about smoking and drinking, which she d oesn't accept, to a few sentences and short
quotations. And she merely refers her reader to Schmidt and Wills, who provide support for her claims
that concern about smoking is recent and that Indians smoked tobacco for its pleasant effect. (Later in
the p aper she uses, as primary sources, interviews she conducted with adolescents about their first
smoking and drinking experiences.) She makes clear the relevance of the summary of Diamond to her
argument in the sentence at lines 5-6 that leads up to the sum mary, providing an argumentative context
for it (But ultimate explanations may conflict with proximate evidence) and then again by explicitly
discussing the summarized material in the sentences following the quotation (An apparent problem with
t his explanation). Since her summary of Diamond continues for several lines, she reminds the reader in
the middle of line 15 (he suggests) that she is still summarizing. And she has been careful to paraphrase
at those times in her summary when she may have been tempted merely to repeat her source's words.

When she paraphrases this sentence in Diamond's book:
It seems to me that Zahavi's theory applies to many costly

or
dangerous human behaviors aimed at achieving status in
general
or at sexual benefits in particular.
her paraphrase, at lines 16-17, is substantially different in both language and sentence structure:
risky human actions, including the use of drugs, are

designed to
impress potential mates and competitors in the way Zahavi
suggests
risky animal actions are (198).
The student excerpt also illustrates one further rule: mention the nature or professional status of your
source if it's distinctive. Don't denote a source in a Psychology paper as "psychologist Anne Smith" or
in an liter ature paper as "literary critic Wayne Booth." But do mention professional qualification,
especially where you are quoting, when it isn't apparent from the nature of the course or paperÑas here,
in a paper for a Social Analysis course, when the stud ent uses a physiologist and a zoologist (Ilines 7-8).
And do describe the nature of a source that is especially authoritative or distinctive: if it's the seminal
article or standard biography, for example, or an especially famous or massive or recent study (line 7),
or by the leading expert or a first-hand witness, etc.
MENTIONING A TITLE IN YOUR PAPER

Underline or italicize a book (line 7) or collection, journal or newpaper, play, long poem, film,
musical composition, or artwork. Put in quotation marks the title of an indivi dual article, chapter,
essay, story, or poem. Don't underline the Bible or its books, or legal documents like the Constitution.
Italicizing is the equivalent of underlining: don't do both, except for words already italicized or
underlined in a title: The Making of The Origin of Species or The Making of The Origin of Species.
1.2 Rules for Quoting
General Principles

(a) Quote only what you need or is really striking. If you quote too much, you may convey the
impression that you haven't digested the material or that you are merely padding the length of your
paper. Whenever possible, keep your quotations under a sentence, short enough to embed gracefully in
one of your own sentences. Don't quote lazily; where you are tempted to reproduce a long passage of
several sentences, see if you can quote instead a few of its key phrases and link them wit h concise
summary.
(b) Construct your own sentence so the quotation fits smoothly into it. The student has done this at If
you must add or change a word in the quotation to make it fit into your sentence, put brackets [ ] around
the altered portion. A source phrase like "nosta lgia for my salad days" might appear in your sentence as
he speaks of "nostalgia for [his] salad days." A source comment like "I deeply distrust Freud's method
of interpretation" might become he writes that he "deeply distrust[s] Freud's method of interpretation."
But always try to construct your sentence so you can quote verbatim, without this cumbersome
apparatus. (If you need only to change an initial capital-letter to a lower-case letter, you may do so
silently, without brackets around t he letter.)
(c) Usually announce a quotation in the words preceding it (as the student does in line 12 with writes
Diamond) so your reader enters the quoted passage knowing who will be speaking and won't have to
reread the passage in l ight of that information. Withholding the identity of a source until a citation at the
end of the sentence is acceptable when you invoke but don't discuss a source (as with Bell, Schmidt, and
Wills in the student excerpt, and commonly throughout science and social-science writing) or when the
identity of the quoted source is much less important than, or a distraction from, what the source saysÑas
for example when you are sampling opinion. In a History paper, for instance, you might give a series o f
short quotations illustrating a common belief in the divine right of kings; in an English paper you might
quote a few representative early reviews of Walt Whitman. In neither case would the identity of the
quoted individuals be important enough to requi re advance notice in your sentence. Otherwise, set up
quotations by at least saying who is about to speak.
(d) Choose your announcing verb carefully. Don't say "Diamond states that," for example, unless you
mean to imply a deliberate pro-nouncement, to be scrutinized like the wording of a statute or a Biblical
commandment. Choose rathe r a more neutral verb ("writes," "says," "observes," "suggests," "remarks")
or a verb that catches exactly the attitude you want to convey ("laments," "protests," "charges," "replies,"
"admits," "claims," etc.).
Technical Rules
(a) Don't automatically put a comma before a quotation, as you do in writing dialogue. Do so only if
the grammar of your sentence requires it (as the sentence at line 11 of the student excerpt on p. 5 does,
whereas the sentence at line 28 does not).
(b) Put a period or comma at the end of a quotation inside the close-quotation mark, as in lines 14 and

28 of the student excerpt; put colons and semi-colons outside the close-quotation mark. But if your
sentence or clause ends in a parenthetical citation, put the period or comma after the citation. (See the
exception for block quotations in 1.3f below.)
(c) Use a slash (/) to indicate a line-break in a quoted passage of poetry, inserting a space before and
after the slash: Hamlet wonders if it is "nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune" or physically to act and end them.
(d) Punctuate the end of a quotation embedded in your sentence with whatever punctuation your
sentence requires, not with the source-author's punctuation. In the student's sentence at lines 12-14,
Diamond may or may not en d his sentence after "passed"; but since the student ends her own sentence
there, she uses a period.
(e) Otherwise, quote verbatim, carefully double-checking with the source after you write or type the
words. If you italicize or otherwise emphasize certain words in the quoted passageÑwhich you should
do very rarelyÑadd in parent hesis after your close-quotation mark the phrase (my emphasis) or the
phrase (emphasis added). If the source passage is misspelled or ungrammatical, add in brackets after the
relevant word or phrase the italicized Latin word [sic], m eaning "thus," to make clear that the mistake is
in the source.
ELLIPSIS
Wherever you omit words from the middle of a source passage that you are quoting, insert three
spaced periods to indicate the omission: "Even to take drugs once or twice," Diamond writes, "I must
be strong enough to get past . . . the misery of my first hangover" (199). If a sentence ends within the
omitted portion, add a fourth period after the ellipsis to indicate this. Make sure you don't, by
omitting crucial words, give a false sense of what the full p assage says (see section 3.2a). Don't use
an ellipsis at the start of a quotation, and only use one at the end if you are quoting a block and have
omitted words from the end of the last sentence quoted.
1.3 Quoting Blocks
If you need to quote more than five lines of prose or two verses of poetry, set off and indent the passage
as a block. The student on p. 5 does this when she quotes three consecutive sentences of Diamond's book
at line 20 ("I'm strong and I'm superior ") that give a particularly vivid statement of Diamond's theory
and allow her to focus her criticisms on something specific. In most college papers, especially in the
sciences and social sciences, try to avoid quoting blocks. Long passages of other pe ople's voices and
ideas can drown out your own, and they take up space that you should devote to your analysis. But some
fields, and certain kinds of papers, require you to consider the language of a text closelyÑthe language
of a speech by Lincoln, an ar gument by Kant, a medieval treatise on women, an eyewitness account of a
revolution. In such papers you will probably need to quote several blocks for detailed inspection.

The basic rules for quoting blocks are these:
(a) Indent all lines 10 spaces from the left margin, to distinguish a block from a paragraph break.
Single-space the block, to demarcate it further, unless you are otherwise instructed. (Manuscript format
for many journals require s double-spaced blocks, and so do some instructors.)
(b) Don't put an indented block in quotation marks; the indenting replaces quotation marks. Only use
quotation marks in an indented block where the source author him- or herself is quoting or is reporting
spoken words (as when Hom er reports Achilles' funeral oration in the Iliad).
(c) Tell your readers in advance who is about to speak and what to be listening for. Don't send them
unguided through a long stretch of someone else's words. Notice how the student sets up the block
quotation in lines 18-19, telli ng us beforehand both what we will be listening to and what we should
listen for: Diamond's characterization of the message that human teenagers send by smoking and
drinking creates an image of a strutting animal.
(d) Construct your lead-in sentence so that it ends with a colonÑpointing the reader ahead (as the
student does at line 19) to the quotation itself. Occasionally, clarity or momentum may be better served
by having the grammar of your lead-in run directly into your quotation, in which case you may require a
comma or no punctuation at all. But this should be the exception, not the rule.
(e) Follow up a block quotation with commentary that reflects on it and makes clear why you needed
to quote it. Your follow-upÑunless you have discussed the quotation in the sentences leading up to
itÑshould usually be at least tw o sentences long, and it should generally involve repeating or echoing
the language of the quotation itself, as you draw out its significance. Any quotation, like any fact, is only
as good as what you make of it. After her block quotation of Diamond, the student follows up at length,
echoing the language of the quotation ("remain alive and healthy," line 28) in her analysis of it. Another
way to state this rule would be: avoid ending a paragraph on a block quotation; end wi th a follow-up
commentary that pulls your reader out of the quotation and back into your own argument about the
quoted material.
(f) When using in-text parenthetic citation, put your citation of a block quotation outside the period at
the end of the last sentence quoted. This makes clear that the citation applies to the whole block, not
only to the last se ntence quoted. Note where the (199) comes at the end of the block quotation in line 24.
1.4 Using Discursive Notes
You will occasionally want to tell your reader something that neither directly advances your argument
nor acknowledges or documents a source. For this you should use a discursive footnote or endnote.
Except in a long research paper or th esis, use discursive footnotes sparingly; in most cases, if the note is
really interesting enough to include, you should work it into the argument of your paperÑor save it for

another paper. But you may sometimes wish to do the following:
(a) briefly amplify, qualify, or draw out implications of your argu-mentÑas on p. 1 of this booklet, and
in the following:
6. These differences are not small: in 1990 the US

spent 45
percent more per capita than Canada, nearly three-quarters
more than
Germany and three times as much as the United Kingdom
(Kingshorn 121;
Connors 11).
12. The use of the word "smelly" in this passage is

illuminated
by Jeffrey Myers's observation that Orwell "uses odor as a
kind of
ethical touchstone" (62). Orwell concludes his essay on
Gandhi,
Myers notes, by remarking "how clean a smell he has managed
to leave
behind" and says that the autobiography of Dali, the moral
antithesis of Gandhi, "is a book that stinks."
(b) announce a non-standard edition or your own translating:
3. All translations from Pasteur are my own; I use the

Malouf edition, which is based on an earlier and more
complete
draft of the treatise.
(c) direct your reader to further reading, or mention the ideas of another writer that are similar to yours:
5. See chapter 3 of George Folsom's Rectitudes

(London: Chatto,
1949) for an excellent summary of gnostic doctrine and a
slightly
different critique of the ontologial argument, stressing
agency
rather than effect.
(d) explain something about your citing system, or about your use of terms, or about the meaning of
your acronyms and abbreviations:
2. Unless otherwise noted, references to Locke are to

The
Second Treatise on Government, ed. Thomas Peardon
(Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1952),which will be cited by page number
only.
3. Dickinson's poems are cited by their number in the

Johnson
edition, not by page number.
4. In this paper NK will refer to a natural cell-

killer.

CITING SOURCES
CITING SOURCES
2.1 When to Cite
You cite a source by making a notation or signal in your paper that refers your reader to a place where
you give full publication data about the source. For all types of assignments (papers, problem sets, take-
home exams, computer programs, lab and other reports) and for all types of sources (expert and student,
printed and on-line; textual, numerical, graphic, and oral), you should cite on the following occasions:
(a) Whenever you use factual information or data you found in a source, so your reader knows who
gathered the information and where to find its original form. (But see "common knowledge," section
2.2b.)
(b) Whenever you quote verbatim two or more words in a row, or even a single word or label that's
distinctive or striking, so the reader can verify the accuracy and context of your quotation, and will
credit the source for craftin g the exact formulation. Words you take verbatim from another person also
need to be put in quotation marks, even if you take only two or three words; it's not enough simply to
cite. If you go on to use the quoted word or phrase repeatedly in your paper, however, as part of your
analytic vocabulary, you don't need to cite it each subsequent timeÑprovided you have established the
source initially.
(c) Whenever you summarize, paraphrase, or otherwise use ideas, opinions, interpretations, or
conclusions arrived at by another person so your readers know that you are summarizing thoughts
formulated by someone else, whose author ity your citation invokes, and whose formulations readers can
consult and check against your summary.
(d) Whenever you make use of a source passage's distinctive structure, organizing strategy, or
method, such as the way an argument is divided into distinct parts or sections or kinds, or a distinction is
made between two aspects o f a problem; or such as a particular procedure for studying some
phenomenon (in a text, in the laboratory, in the field) that was developed by a certain person or group.
Citing tells your readers that the strategy or method isn't original with you and all ows them to consult
its original context.
(e) Whenever you mention in passing some aspect of another person's work, unless that work is very
widely known, so readers know where they can follow up on the reference.
When you're in doubt as to whether to cite a source or not, cite. Note that these rules apply even to
sources assigned as readings for a class or included in its sourcebook, to sources that merely summarize
other sources, and to lectures. The fact that your instructor will instantly recognize your use of a course
text doesn't change the need to acknowledge it. Your goal is to write an argument persuasive to all

CITING SOURCES
interested readers, not just to your instructor. Again, it might seem unnecessary to cite bac kground infor-
mation to your argument, such as an account of a work's historical context or a survey of previous work
done on the topic. But even if these matters are common knowledge in the field, if your knowledge of
them isn't first-hand, your r eader needs to know where your version of the background facts came from.
Finally, since a lecture is a carefully constructed presentation by an authority in the field, and may itself
draw on other authorities, you should cite if you use a distinctive idea, phrase, or piece of information
from a lecture. Some instructors may want you to regard their lectures, for the purposes of their class
only, as common knowledge not to be cited; but you should ask about this before using lecture material.
WHEN QUOTING OR CITING A PASSAGE YOU FOUND QUOTED OR CITED BY

ANOTHER SCHOLAR
When qouting or citing a passage you found quoted or cited by another scholar, and you haven't
actually read the original source, cite the passage as "quoted in" or "cited in" that scholarÑboth to
credit that person for finding the quot ed passage or cited text, and to protect yourself in case he or
she has misquoted.or misrepresented (see "Indirect Source" p. 44). Always read for yourself any
source that's important to your argument, rather than relying on an abstract or a summary in a nother
source.
2.2 When Not to Cite
If you find yourself citing sources for almost everything in your paper, or for entire paragraphs, you are
probably giving too much rehash of other people's ideas and need to generate more ideas of your own.
But you may also be citing when you don't need to, as on the following occasions:
(a) When the source and page-location of the relevant passage are obvious from a citation earlier in
your own paragraph. If you refer to the same page in your source for many sentences in a row, you don't
need to cite the source a gain until you refer to a different page in it or start a new paragraph of your
paper (as the student in CHapter 1 doesn't give a page reference for lines 11-14). Note, however, that
your language needs constantly to make clear where you are drawing on a sourc e, not giving your own
ideas, by using phrasing like "Aristotle further observes that ...." It isn't enough, when your paragraph
draws repeatedly on a source, simply to give a single citation at the start or end of that paragraphÑunless
you write each sentence to preclude ambiguity about where the words, ideas, or information come from.
(b) When dealing with "common knowledge," knowledge that is familiar or easily available in many
different sources (including encyc-lopedias, dictionaries, basic textbooks) and isn't arguable or based on
a particular interpretatio n. The date of the Stock Market Crash, the distance to Saturn, the structure of
the American congress, the date of birth of the discoverer of DNA: this is commonly available
knowledge. In the paper excerpted on pp. 4-5, the student doesn't need to cite he r passing reference to
Freud's notion of "oral fixation" (line 5), or to the fact that gentlemen used to have an after-dinner cigar
separate from the ladies (line 32). If she had gone on to say that this after-dinner ritual occured even in

CITING SOURCES
matriarchal so cietiesÑan unfamiliar ideaÑshe would have needed to cite a source. Obviously, what
counts as "common knowledge" varies from situation to situation; when in doubt, askÑor cite anyway,
to be safe. Note that when you draw a great deal of information from a single source, you should cite
that source even if the information is common knowledge, since the source (and its particular way of
organizing the information) has made a significant contribution to your paper.
(c) When you use phrases that have become part of everyday speech: you don't need to remind your
reader where "all the world's a stage" or "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" first appeared, or
even to put such phrases i n quotation marks.
(d) When you draw on ideas or phrases that arose in conversation with a friend, classmate, or
Teaching FellowÑincluding conversation in section and by e-mail or other electronic media. You should
acknowledge help of this kind, how ever, in a note (see section 2.4 below). Be aware that these people
may be themselves using phrases and ideas from their reading or lectures; if you write a paper that
depends heavily on an idea you heard in conversation with som eone, you should check with that person
about the source of the idea. Also be aware that no Teaching Fellow will appreciate your incorporating
his or her ideas verbatim into your paper, but will rather expect you to express the ideas in your own
way and to develop them.
2.3 Methods of Citing
When you cite sources is more important than how you cite them, but knowing how makes it easier to
know when. The basic requirements are to give your reader enough information to locate your source,
and to be clear and consistent in the way you give it. "Enough" information means the author's name, the
title of the item and of any volume that includes it, the date of the volume's publication, and often the
particular page number to which you refer. When the volume is a journal, you need to give its volu me
number and the inclusive page numbers of the item; when it's a book, you need to give the place of
publication and usually the name of the publisher. On-line, oral, and other sources require further
information.
Several recognized styles of presenting this information are detailed in Appendices A and B. Most styles
use one of three basic methods:
(a) Sequential Notes: In this method, you insert a raised reference numeral into your paper after a
sentence in which you use source-materialÑor, if required for clear attribution, after a particular phrase
in the middle of your sentence. This numeral refers your reader to a note at the bottom of the page
(footnotes) or end of the paper (endnotes) that begins with the same numeral and gives information
about the source. In
Diamond suggests that humans share the same "unconscious

instinct"
that makes birds give dangerous displays.7

CITING SOURCES
the raised 7 refers the reader to this note that gives source and page:
7. Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and

Future of the Human Animal (New York: Harper Collins,
1992), 199.
Citing by footnotes or endnotes adds minimal clutter into the body of your paper, and it disrupts the flow
of your sentences less than other citation methods.
(b) In-Text Citing: In this method you indicate in the text of your paper itself not only the name of the
source author, but also either the number of the specific page on which the information, idea, or passage
is found (i n the humanities) or the year in which the source was published (in the social sciences and
sciences), or both (in a social-sciences variation). The author's name may appear in the sentence itself or
in parentheses; the page number or year o f publication always appears in parentheses. This sentence
uses author-page style:
Physiologist Jared Diamond proposes that self-destructive

human
actions are an evolutionary signal of superior powers (196).
This uses author-year style:
Recent explanations suggest that such actions are

evolutionary
signals of superior powers (Diamond, 1992).
And this uses author-year-page style:
Diamond (1992: 196) has proposed that self-destructive human

actions are an evolutionary signal of superior powers. (3)
These signals in the sentence refer the reader, in author-page citing, to an alphabetical list of "Works
Cited" whose entries look like this:
Diamond, Jared. The Third Chimpanzee: The Future and

Evolution of the Human Animal. New York: Harper
Collins, 1992.

CITING SOURCES
Since author-page citing keeps the exact page-location in the source attached to your use of the source
passage in your paper, it works well for papers about longer texts, and for literary or philosophical
papers that quote and examine passages closely or examine many different passages from the same
source. See pages 32-3 and 40-51 for details of MLA style.
Author-year and author-year-page signals refer to an alphabetical list of "References," whose format
emphasizes date of publication:
Diamond, J. (1992). The third chimpanzee: The future and

evolution of the human animal. New York: Harper
Collins.
Author-year citing emphasizes year, rather than page number, because in a Biology or Psychology paper
you are usually citing authors who over the years have written many short papers on a subject, in a
steady process of developing, testing, and correcting hypotheses. And you are usually citing those papers
for their main idea or findingÑnot for a particular aspect or section of a paper, or for the wording of a
particular passage. Author-year-page style accommodates social scientists (like anthropologists) who
work as often with passages from books as with articles. Pages 35-6 and 40-51 give specifics of APA,
CBE, and an author-year-page style.
(c) Coding: Many journals in the sciences require you to identify each of your sources by a symbol or
markerÑusually a numeral but sometimes an initial letter of one or more author surnames. This numeral
or letter appears in parentheses or brackets in your paper each time you refer to that source, and it refers
to a list of "References" at the end of the paper. Often sources are coded by order of their first mention in
the paper. This sentence cites the third source mentioned :
Recent explanations have suggested that such actions are

evolutionary signals of superior powers (3).
Even if this source is cited again, late in the paper, it is still identified by its code number (3); and it
appears third in your list of references. In another version of the method, sources are coded by their
number in an alphabetic list of referencesÑ in which case the (3) in the example above would refer to the
third source in the alphabetic list. Or, if you were coding by initials, Diamond might be cited at the end
of the sentence as [D], and listed after the symbol [D] in an alphabetical list of re ferences. An article by
Wallace, Dobbs, and Hershey might be coded as [WDH].
Like footnoting, coding has the advantage of requiring little apparatus in your text. And like in-text
citing, it eliminates the need to make a note each time you use a certain source. It's appropriate for
papers in the sciences, including Biology, Physi cs, Chemistry, and Math, where sources are mostly brief
articles that you don't directly quote.

CITING SOURCES
2.4 Acknowledging Uncited Sources
Any time you write a paper of more than a few pages, you draw on many influences: both sources you
cite and less immediate or formal sources such as the lessons of former teachers, conversations with
friends, class discussions, books you read in the summ er or for other classes. When you have benefitted
substantially from information or ideas in sources like these that don't appear in your list of references,
you should acknowledge their help in a footnote or endnote of acknowledgment. Do ing so shows you
to be both generous and intellectually self-aware.
If you are acknowledging help of a general kind, evident throughout your paper, put the raised reference-
number for the note immediately after your title or at the point at which you first state your main idea,
and put the note at the bottom of your fir st page or at the beginning of your endnotes. If you are
acknowledging help on a specific point, put the note at the bottom of that page or at the appropriate
point in your sequence of footnotes or endnotes. Some samples:
1. My understanding of Reconstruction is influenced by my reading of W. J. Cash's Mind

of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941) and by discussions with Carol Peters and Tom
Wah.
7. I am indebted for this observation and for the term "self-researching" to Susan Lin's
comments in Anthro 25 section (2/6/94).
1. I wish to thank Roberto Perez for his objections to an earlier draft of this paper. 1. Work
for this assignment was done in collaboration with Vanessa Praz, who is mostly
responsible for the "methods" section.
6. I owe this example to Norma Knolls, whose help in understanding the mathematics of
decision theory I gratefully acknowledge.
2. In this paper I use an analogy between soul and state developed in Prof. Caroline Hill's
lectures for Government 144, Harvard University, fall term 1993-94.

Misuse of Sources
MISUSE OF SOURCES
3.1 Plagiarism
Plagiarism is passing off a source's information, ideas, or words as your own by omitting to cite themÑan act
of lying, cheating, and stealing. Plagiarus means kidnapper, in Latin, because in antiquity plagiarii were
pirates who sometimes s tole children: when you plagiarize, as several commentators have observed, you steal
the brain child of another.2 But since you also claim that it's your own brain child, and use it to get credit for
work you haven't really done, you al so lie and cheat. You cheat your source of fair recognition for his or her
efforts, and you cheat the students who have completed the same assignment without plagiarizing.
Incidents of plagiarism vary in seriousness and in circumstance. Occasionally, a student is truly confused
about the rules of acknow-ledgement, or obliviously incorporates a few vivid phrases from a source. And
occasionally, at the other end of the scal e, a student calmly plagiarizes a whole paper because he or she
simply doesn't care about a course, or is unwilling to give it any time. Most often, however, the plagiarist has
started out with good intentions but hasn't left enough time to do the reading and thinking that the assignment
requires, has become desperate, and just wants the whole thing done with. At this point, in one common
scenario, the student gets careless while taking notes on a source or incorporating notes into a draft, so the
source' s words and ideas blur into those of the student, who has neither the time nor the inclination to resist
the blurring. In another scenario, the student simply panics and plagiarizes from a secondary source or from
another studentÑcopying from the source d irectly or slightly rephrasingÑhoping to get away with it just this
one time.
Plagiarism can occur on any kind of assignment, from a two-page problem set or response paper to a 20-page
research paper. More common than wholesale copying, especially in longer papers, is piecemeal or mosaic
plagiarism, in which a st udent mixes words or ideas of a source (unacknowledged) in with his or her own
words and ideas, or mixes together uncited words and ideas from several sources into a pastiche, or mixes
together properly-cited uses of a source with uncited us es. But at any point in any paper, plagiarism usually
takes one of these forms:
(a) An uncited idea: In the first paragraph on the preceding page, the fact that the Latin root of the word
"plagiarism" is plagiarus or kidnapper is knowledge commonly available in dictionaries, so it doesn't need
citing. The move from this fact to plagiarism as stealing a brain child is a distinctive idea, and (unless it's your
own idea) it does need citing. And if, having read that paragraph on the preceding page, you write in an essay
of your own about plagiaris m in Ivy League colleges that "etymologically, plagiarizing involves taking the
brain child of another" and that "plagiarism involves the dastardly trio of lying, cheating, and stealing," you
plagiarize an idea in both cases, if you don't cite this bookle tÑeven though your language differs from that of
your source.
(b) An uncited structure or organizing strategy: If, having read the second paragraph on the previous page,
you break down your own analysis of plagiarism into (a) patch plagiarizing out of ignorance of the rules or
obliviousness, (b) wholesale plagiarizing out of indifference or laziness, and (c) plagiarizing in a time-panic,
and then you say that those who plagiarize in a time-panic do so either by (1) careless note-taking or (2)

Misuse of Sources
deliberate copying, you are plagiarizing a distin ctive intellectual structure or way of proceeding with a
topicÑeven though the language of your own discussion differs from that of the booklet.
(c) Uncited information or data from a source: If, in your essay on plagiarism, you observe that Harvard
College acted on 25 cases of academic dishonesty in 1993-94, and you don't cite this booklet or the User's
Guide to the Administrative Board, you are plagiarizing information. Commonly plagiarized kinds of
information include details of a topic's historical background or accounts (in secondary sources) of previous
work done on the topic.
(d) A verbatim phrase or passage that isn't quoted: If, in your essay on plagiarism, after reading the second
paragraph on the previous page, you observe that "at a certain point in the writing process the student has
neither the time nor the inclination to resist the blurring of his source's words into his own" but don't use
quotation marks at least for the words in the middle of the sentence, you are plagiarizing even if you do cite
the booklet. You may fix on certain words in a source as more striking or apt than those around them, but this
is all the more reason to give credit for the words by quoting.
AVOID ALL-BUT QUOTING

If your own sentences follow the source so closely in idea and sentence structure that the result is really
closer to quotation than to paraphrase (as in the hypothetical sentence in [d] above), you are plagiarizing,
even if you have cited the source. You may not simply alter a few words of your sourceÑeven of an
abstract you read for a literature review. You need to recast your summary into your own words and
sentence structure, or quote directly.
3.2 Other Ways of Misusing Sources
(a) Misrepresenting Evidence: When you have an idea or inter-pretation that you wish to be trueÑespecially
when the assignment is due in a few days or hoursÑyou may be tempted to fudge your evidence to make it
seem true. You may be tempted, for example, to ignore evidence that you know doesn't fit your interpretation,
in which case you are simply betraying your own intelligence. But you may also be tempted into more serious
misuses: quoting a source out of context or in misleadin g excerpts, so it seems to say what you want; or
claiming that a source says something it doesn't; or, even more seriously, altering or fabricating a source or
some data. Since these misuses violate the basic principle of academic inquiry (valid reasoning based on true
evidence), and may suggest an inclination to commit similar errors in later life, serious abuses will result in
serious action by the course, department, or Administrative Board.
(b) Improper Collaboration: This occurs when two students submit more or less identical written work for an
assignment on which they have worked together. Collaborative discussion and brainstorming is a vital activity
of profess ional scholars, especially in the sciences; but these scholars not only acknowledge in each
completed article the contribution of other discussants, but write the article on their ownÑor else submit a
single article under two or more names. When you are a sked to collaborate on a project but required to submit
separate papers, you must write up your paper on your own, acknowledging the extent of your collaboration in
a note (see section 2.4).

Misuse of Sources
You and your partner should not compose the report or exam answer as you sit together, but only take notes. If
you divide up aspects of the assignment (assuming the instructor permits this) you should not write up your
aspect for your partner, but bring your notes to your meeting. And you should discuss each other's notes, not
just photocopy them. Finally, beware of letting your partner read over your finished report at the last minute in
a panic, especially if you have put in most of the work on the pr oject; you may be tempting your partner to
plagiarize. Professional scholars do ask one another to read drafts; but in these cases only one paper is being
produced, not two. If you're unsure about your instructor's policy on collaboration, ask.
(c) Dual Submission: Harvard's policy on this matter is spelled out in the Handbook for Students:
It is the expectation of every course that all work submitted to it will have been done solely for
that course. If the same or similar work is submitted to any other course, the prior written
permission of the instructor must be obtained. I f the same or similar work is submitted to more
than one course during the same term, the prior written permission of all instructors involved
must be obtained. A student who submits the same or similar written work to more than one
course without prior p ermission will ordinarily be required to withdraw from the College.3
Don't take it upon yourself to decide, without consulting your instructor, that work you plan to submit for a
course, though in many places identical to work you turned in for another course, is "different enough" by
virtue of small changes you have made, or an added section, or an altered introduction or conclusion. And
don't, when you are running late and need to submit a paper, simply submit a version of the paper you
submitted for another course. Either act will bring you before the Administrative Boa rd. (Be aware that,
should your instructors give you permission for dual submission, they will likely require from you a longer
paper than they require of other students in the course.)
(d) Abetting Plagiarism: You are also guilty of misusing sources if you knowingly help another student
plagiarizeÑwhether by letting the student copy your own paper, or by selling the student a paper of yours or
somebody else's, or by writing a paper or part of a paper for the student: as, for example, when in the course of
"editing" a paper for another student you go beyond correcting mechanical errors and begin redrafting
significant amounts of the paper. Any of these actions m akes you liable to disciplinary action by the College.
(If another student asks you for help with a paper, try whenever possible to phrase your comments as
questions that will draw out the student's own ideas.)
3.3 Disciplinary Consequences
Not all cases of academic dishonesty are discovered Ñ in 1993-94 Harvard College acted on 25 cases4Ñbut
Harvard policy requires instructors to report all suspected cases to the Dean of the College, and most such
cases are ultimately adju dicated by the Administrative Board. If the majority of Board members believe, after
considering the evidence and your own account of the events, that you misused sources, they will likely vote
that you be required to withdraw from the C ollege for at least two semesters.
Since a vote of requirement to withdraw is effective immediately, you lose all coursework you have done that
semester (unless it's virtually over), along with the money you have paid for it. You must leave Cambridge;
any return to campus will vio late the terms of your withdrawal. You must find a full-time job, stay in it for at

Misuse of Sources
least six months, and have your supervisor send a satisfactory report of your performance in order to be
readmittedÑin addition to writing a statement to the Administrativ e Board demonstrating your readiness to
return to the College. You may be required, during the semester of your return, to complete a series of private
tutorials and exercises on the use of sources, administered through the Program in Expository Writing. Finally,
any letter of recommendation written for you on behalf of Harvard CollegeÑincluding letters to graduate
schools, law schools, and medical schoolsÑwill report that you were required to withdraw for academic
dishonesty. If you are required to withdraw for a second time, you will not, ordinarily, be readmitted.
If the Administrative Board finds that you misused sources, but did so out of genuine confusion, you may be
placed on probation for a time specified by the Board, and required to complete tutorials on the use of
sources. Probation is a f ormal sanction and remains on your Harvard record. It does not appear on your final
transcript, but many professional and graduate schools require Harvard to report whether an applicant has been
placed on disciplinary probation. More information about Adm in-istrative Board procedures and sanctions
can be found in the User's Guide, available from your Assistant Dean or Senior Tutor, and in the Handbook
for Students.
You are liable to disciplinary proceedings and requirement to withdraw even if a misuse of sources is
discovered after you have received a grade for the course. If the Administrative Board determines that you
indeed misused sources, the instructor will b e informed and your grade may be changed.
3.4 How to Avoid High-Risk Situations
Students who misuse sources usually don't set out to; they usually plan to write a thoughtful paper that
displays their own thinking. But they allow themselves to slip into a situation in which they either misuse
sources out of negligence or come to beli eve that they have no choice but to misuse sources. Here are some
suggestions for avoiding such situations, based on Administrative Board records of students who did just the
opposite.
1. Don't leave written work until the last minute, when you may be surprised by how much work the
assignment requires. This doesn't mean that you need to draft the paper weeks in advance (you can start
working on a paper by simply jotting a few words or thoughts somewhere), but it does mean looking over the
instructions for the assignment early on, jotting any first impressions, clearing up any confusions with your
instructor, and getting the topic into your subsconscious mind, wh ich can help you flag potentially useful
material in subsequent reading and lectures. (If you feel you have a special fear or block about writing papers,
or procrastinate excessively, or just don't seem to be able to organize and prioritize work, make an
appointment at the Bureau of Study Counsel.)
2. Don't use secondary sources for a paper unless you are asked or explicitly allowed to. Especially, if you
feel stuck or panicked, don't run to the library and bring back an armload of sources that you hope will jump-
start your o wn thinking. Chances are they will only scatter and paralyze your thinking. Instead, go to your
instructor or section leader for adviceÑor try jump-starting your paper in another way (e.g. by freewriting or
brainstorming, by re-analyzing the assignment it self, by formulating a hard question for yourself to answer,
by locating a problem or conflict, by picking a few key passages and annotating them copiously).

Misuse of Sources
3. Don't rely exclusively on a single secondary source for information or opinion in a research paper. If you
do, your paper may be less well-informed and balanced that it should be, and moreover you may be lulled into
plagiarizing the source. Using several different sources forces you to step back and evaluate or triangulate
them.
4. When you take notes, take pains to distinguish the words and thoughts of the source from your own, so
you don't mistake them for your own later. Adopt these habits in particular:
● Either summarize radically or quote exactlyÑalways using quotation marks when you quote. Don't take
notes by loosely copying out source material and simply changing a few words.
● When you take a note or quote from a source, jot the author's name and page number beside each note
you take (don't simply jot down ideas anonymously) and record the source's publication data on that
same page in your notes, to save yourself having to dig it up as you are rushing to finish your paper.
Save even more time by recording this information in the same order and format you will use for listing
references on your final draft.
● Take or transcribe your notes on sources in a separate word-processing file, not in the file in which you
are drafting your paper. And keep these files separate throughout the writing of the paper, bringing in
source material from your notes only as needed.
5. Take notes actively, not passively. Don't just copy down the source's words or ideas, but record your own
reactions and reflections, questions and hunches. Note where you find yourself resisting or doubting or
puzzling over wha t a source says; jot down possible arguments or observations you might want to make.
These will provide starting points when you turn to write your paper; and they will help keep you from feeling
overwhelmed by your sourcesÑor your notes.
6. Don't try to sound more sophisticated or learned than you are. Your papers aren't expected to sound as
erudite as the books and articles of your expert sources, and indeed your intelligence will emerge most clearly
in a plain, d irect style. Moreover, once you begin to appropriate a voice that isn't yours, it becomes easier
accidentally to appropriate words and ideasÑto plagiarize. Also remember that, when asked to write a research
paper using secondary sources, you are expected to learn from those sources but not to have the same level of
knowledge and originality, or to resolve issues that experts have been debating for years. Your task is to
clarify the issues and bring out their complexity. The way you organize the material t o do this, if you take the
task seriously, will be original.
7. If you feel stuck, confused, or panicked about time, or if you are having problems in your life and can't
concentrate, let your instructor or section leader know. Make contact by e-mail, if it's easier for you, but do
make con tactÑeven if you feel embarrassed because you haven't attended lectures or section or think you're
the only student in the class who is having trouble (you aren't), or if you will have to lose points for a late
paper. Losing points will be a much smaller event, in the story of your life, than being required to withdraw
for plagiarism.
8. Don't ask to borrow another student's paper if you are stuck or running late with an assignment. Reading it
will probably discourage or panic rather than inspire you, and it may tempt you to plagiarize. Instead, ask the
student to help you brainstorm some of your own ideas.

Misuse of Sources
9. Don't write a paper from borrowed notes, since you have no way of knowing the source or the words and
ideas. They may, for example, come directly from a book or lecture, or from a book discussed in lecture.
10. Don't do the actual writing of a paper with another student, or split the writing between youÑunless you
have explicit permission. Even if you collaborate on a project, you're expected to express the results in your
own words.
11. Don't submit to one class a paperÑor even sections of a paperÑthat you have submitted or will submit to
another class, without first getting the written permission of both instructors and filing the permission with
your Senior Tutor or Assistant Dean.
12 Always back up your work on diskette, and make a hard copy each time you end a long working session
or finish a paper. This will reduce your chances of finding yourself in a desperate situation caused by
computer failure.
IF YOU ENCOUNTER "YOUR" IDEA IN A SOURCE

Don't pretend that you never encountered the source; but don't panic either. If it's your major idea and
you're near the end of work on the paper, finish writing your argument as you have conceived it. Then look
closely at the source in question: chances are that its idea isn't exactly the same as yours, that you have a
slightly different emphasis or slant, or that you are considering somewhat different topics and evidence. In
this case you can either mention and cite the source in the course of your argument ("my contention, like
Ann Harrison's, is that..." or "I share Ann Harrison's view that..."), but stress the differences in your
account, what you have noticed that Harrison hasn't. Or you can go back and rec ast your argument slightly,
to make it distinct from the source's. If the argument in the source really is the same as yours, and you are
in the midst of a long paper, go to your instructor, who may be able to suggest a slightly different direction
for yo ur paper. If you aren't writing a big paper, and haven't time to recast, use a note of acknowledgement:
12. In the final stages of writing this paper I discovered

Ann Harrison's article "Echo and her Medieval Sisters,"
Centennial Review 26.4 (Fall 1982), 326-340, which comes to
the
same conclusion. See pp. 331-2.
Don't try to use such a note to cover plagiarism. Your instructor will know from your paper whether you
had your own, well-developed ideas before reading the source, and may ask you to produce your rough
notes or drafts. (To be safe, always hold on to your notes and drafts until a paper has been returned.)

Appendix A -- Placing Citations
Note: When you encounter a situation not mentioned in Appendix A or B and that can't be
improvised from a situation that is mentioned, consult the more exhaustive manuals listed
in Appendix C. Some instructors may want you to use a citation style other than those
described here: be sure to ask.
APPENDIX A PLACING CITATIONS IN YOUR

PAPER
1. Footnote or Endnote Style
In the note style used by the Chicago Manual of Style, put your reference number whenever possible at
the end of your sentence, outside the period and outside a close-quotation mark that follows the period:

instinct"
that makes birds give dangerous displays.7

instinct."1
For clarity, however, you may occasionally need to put the reference number within your sentence
(where it follows any punctuation except a dash, which it precedes) or to put one number within the
sentence and another at the end:
Although Jared Diamond suggests that humans share the same

"unconscious instinct" that makes birds give dangerous
displays,6
others have suggested more political explanation for
recklessness.7
To reduce the number of notes, you may cite more than one source with a single reference number, but
always make clear what source pertains to what part of your sentence, using the "for/see" formula or
some other. You might cite Diamond and the "others" together at the end of the sentence above, and
document them in a single note:
7. See Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and

Future
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources/app_a.html (1 of 7)3/29/2004 8:33:39 PM

of the Human Animal (San Diego: Harper Collins, 1992), 192-

204. For
a more psychological account see Melvin Konner, Why the
Reckless
Survive--and Other Secrets of Human Nature (New York:
Viking, 1990),
esp. 133-37.
Citing a source for a second or subsequent time, you need only give the author's surname and a page
reference:
8. Diamond, 196.
If you are using several sources by the author, use an abbreviated title as well:
8. Diamond, Third, 196.
Special Cases
(a) If you reproduce an artwork or illustration from a source, refer your reader to the figure or
illustration number you have given it (see figure 4) and cite the source immediately below the item by
artist, title, date, and source data :
Illus. 4. KŠthe Kollwitz, Home Worker, 1910 (charcoal 16" x 22", Los Angeles County
Museum). In Women Artists 1550-1950, ed. Anne Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin
(New York: Knopf, 1981), 264. < /BLOCKQUOTE> If you reproduce a chart, graph,
statistical table, map, or other illustration from a source, use the procedure described on p.
37. If you have a bibliography, list an artwork by surname of the artist, a chart or graph by
the source text's author.
(b) If you refer to a specific passage in a literary work, clarity may require you to give
the location of the passage in your sentence (at line 23 he writes...). If not, give this
location at the end of your note. For a poem of m ore than 12 lines, give the relevant line
number or numbers, using l. for "line: and ll. for "lines." For a specific passage in a novel
or long poem, give the chapter or section number before giving the page numbe r (Ch. 14,
p. 26). For a passage in a play in verse, instead of page number give act, scene, and line
numbers, separated by a period:
6. Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 3.1.56-68.
2. In-Text Style for the Humanities

In the author-and-page style of the Modern Languages Association Handbook (MLA),

usually give the author's name in your sentence and the relevant page number in
parentheses at the end of your sentence, to minimize clutter:
Jared Diamond proposes that self-destructive human

actions are
an evolutionary signal of superior powers (196).
As Diamond says, "the bigger the handicap, the

more rigorous the test
he has passed" (196).
Note that the parenthetic citation goes inside the period that ends your sentence (except
when quoting a block: see section 1.3f ) and that after quoted passages the citation goes
outside the close-quotation mark, since it isn't part of the quotation. Whe n you aren't
discussing or quoting a source, you may put the name in the parentheses with the page
number:
Public concern about smoking appeared much later

(Schmidt 29).
And where it's necessary to make clear that one part of your sentence comes from a source
but another part from you (or another source), you may insert your reference mid-
sentence. But put it at a natural pausing point, and before the punctuation that end s the
clause:
Although public concern about smoking appeared

much later (Schmidt
29), it appeared precisely when the advertising
campaigns did.
Note that MLA style requires no p. for "page" or pp. for "pages" and no comma between
name and page. If the idea or information you cite comes from two or more sources,
however, include both, separated by a semicolon (Brill 103; Costa and Lerner 132).
Special Cases
(a) If your source has several volumes, give the volume number and a colon before the
page reference, as in (2: 347) or (Winslow 2: 347).

(b) If you use more than one work by the same source, put an abbreviated title of the
source in your citation, to indicate which of the texts you refer toÑhere The Third
Chimpanzee:
Jared Diamond proposes that self-destructive human

actions are
an evolutionary signal of superior powers (Third
196).
(c) If a source has two or three authors, mention all the names in the signal phrase in
your sentence or put them in your parenthetic citation: (Baker, Smythe, and Wills 207). If
a source has more than three authors, use the first surname with et al. ("and others") in
your sentence or in your citation: (Belenky et al.).
(d) If a source gives no author, use an abbreviated form of the title. An anonymous article
called "Lost Tribes of the Gobi" might be cited as ("Lost" 88).
(e) When quoting a source you found quoted in another scholar, and know only from
that quotation, cite the source as "qtd. in" that scholar:
During the walk, according to Keats, Coleridge

"talked without
stopping" (qtd. in Murray 66).
(f) When you refer to a particular passage in a poem, novel, or play: for a novel or poem,
give chapter or line number after page number, using ch. for chapter and l. or ll. for line or
lines:
In "Mending Wall," Frost at first does not seem

ironic when he
says that "good fences make good neighbors" (52;
l. 27).
For a play in verse, cite act, scene, and line number (separated by periods) instead of a
page number.
When Hamlet says "O heart, lose not thy nature,"

he means by
"nature" his filial feeling (3.3.351).
(g) When you reproduce an artwork or illustration, direct your reader to the figure or
illustration number that you have given it: (see figure 5). Beneath the item, give the artist's

full name, then the name of the work and its d ate. If your paper focusses on the artistic
medium, add also the medium of the work, its dimensions, and its location or owner:
John F. Kensett: Sunset with Cows, 1856. Oil on

canvas,
36 X 39 inches.
In your list of works cited, document the source from which you have taken the item.
according to #22 in Appendix B. If you reproduce a chart, table, graph, or map, use the
format illustrated on p. 37.
pp. for "pages":
As Diamond (1992) observes, "the bigger the

handicap, the more
rigorous the test he has passed" (p. 196).
Special Cases
(a) If a source has two authors, cite both authors' names each time you cite: (Balough &
Stearns, 1988). For a source with three to five authors, cite the first time using all the
authors' surnames: (Belenk y, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986), but in subsequent
citations cite only the first surname followed by "et al.": (Belenky et al., 1986). Cite a
source with six or more authors by the first author's surname and et al. fr om the start.
(b) Cite a source you found mentioned in another scholar but haven't read yourself as
(cited in Fiske, 1988). But do this rarely: see p. 14.
(c) If the author is an agency with a long name, name it once the first time in full,
followed immediately by brackets containing the abbreviation that you will use in
parentheses in all subsequent citations: (U. S. Department of H ealth and Human Services,
1989) [USDHHS].
(d) If a source gives no author, use a one or two word abbreviation of the title in your
citation: (Lost Tribes, 1990).
(e) When using more than one source published by the same author in the same year,
cite and document the first as (Stearns and Wyn, 1990a) and the second as (Stearns and
Wyn, 1990b).
(f) When you use an illustration, chart, or table from a source, identify the item by
placing above it a figure or table number, a title, and any required explanation. Put your

citation below the item, starting with the word "Source" o r "From," if you copy directly;
"Redrawn from" if you redraw; and "Modified from" or "Adapted from" if you have made
even minor changes. Then give name, publication data, and page. Include the source again
in your reference list. E.g.:
Figure 4. Performance by three groups of children on nine memory tasks.

N=children of normal academic achievement; LD-N=learning disabled
children who performed in the average range on short-term memory tests;
LD-S=learning disabled children w ho performed poorly.
Source: Farnham-Diggory, Sylvia. (1992). The learning disabled child.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 121.
(g) Don't include in your reference list a personal interview you conducted, a letter or e-
mail message you received, or a conversation you had; give the information in your text:
A lawyer for the teachers, Diana Scholtz, said

that the action had been
pending for several years (personal communication,
April 1, 1995).
<A NAME="app_a.4>
4. A Coding Style for the Sciences
If your instructor doesn't require you to use the style of a particular publication, use the
format for references illustrated in Appendix B, and adopt the following procedure for
placing citations in your paper. Assign each source a number based on th e order of first
mention in your paper, and place the reference numbers in parentheses. If possible, place
them at the end of your sentences, but place them elsewhere if necessary for clarity. When
you refer to several sources in the same citation, arr ange them in descending order of
relevance or importance to your point:
In accordance with published protocols (11, 3, 8),

purification of VP2
was performed identically.
When you refer to a source with three or more authors, abbreviate it in your sentence to
the first surname plus et al.:

As Garcia et al. have shown, this interpretation

fails to account for a
key variable (3).
If you cite a personal communication (in a conversation, letter, or e-mail message) give
the information in your paper, not in your list of references:
Recent attempts by the same laboratory to

duplicate this result have
been unsuccessful (W. Deeb, personal
communication, 6 April 1993).
If you use an illustration, chart, or table from a source, use the procedure described above
on p. 37.

APPENDIX B FORMATTING REFERENCES
APPENDIX B
FORMATTING REFERENCES
● No author given?
● Multiple authorship?
● Repeated author?
● In a class sourcebook?
● Indirect source?
● Electronic media?
Basic Sources and Variants
1. Book
2. Article or work in a journal
3. Article, excerpt, or work in an edited collection
4. Article or work in a non-edited collection by the author
5. Article in a magazine or newspaper
Other Articles and Short Items
6. Article in a reference work

7. Review
8. Preface, introduction, or foreword
9. Letter in a published collection
10. Letter or papers in an archive
11. Unpublished dissertation or paper
Other Books
12. Book with author and editor

13. Book in several volumes
14. Reprinted book
15. Book in a series
16. Translated book
17. Government publication
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources/app_b.html (1 of 21)3/29/2004 8:34:20 PM

18. Book with a corporate author
Electronic and Other Sources
19. Class lecture, conference paper, speech, or performance

20. Personal interview, letter, or e-mail
21. Legal case
22. Artwork or illustration
23. Musical recording or score
24. Film or video
25. Work, article, or information on the Internet
26. Text from an information service or database
27. Abstract from an information service or database
28. Contribution to an electronic newsgroup or bulletin board
Basic Sources
Start your list of endnotes or references on a new page, after the last page of your text. Start footnotes,
on each page, four lines from the bottom of your last line of text, making sure you stop your text soon
enough to fit the entire note on the pa ge. Single space notes and references, unless instructed otherwise,
but double space between them. In the following examples,
nt = footnotes or list of
"Endnotes"
MLA = "Works Cited" list for MLA
author-page citing
APA = "References" list for APA
author-year citing
CBE = "References" list for CBE
author-year citing
ayp = "References" list for author-
year-page citing
cd = "References" or "References and
Notes" list for coding
If you are required to attach a bibliography to your paper, in addition to notes or references, use MLA
format but call the list "Bibliography."
1. Book

nt
1. Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.:

Belknap-Harvard Univ. Press), 39.
MLA
Trimpi, Wesley. Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study of the Plain

Style. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1962.
APA
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple

intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
CBE
Woese, C. R. 1967. The genetic code: The molecular basis for

genetic expression. New York: Harper and Row.
ayp
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
cd
1. Woese, C. R. The genetic code: The molecular basis for

genetic expression. 2nd ed. New York: Harper and Row; 1967.
If the title page indicates that you are using an edition other than the first, indicate the designated
edition (e.g. "2d ed." or "rev. ed") immediately after the title, as in the last sample. For a volume
published before 1900, omit the name of the publisher (some publications in the fields of history and
classics omit it for all books). If the book is published by a smaller imprint of a large publishing
company (as Belknap is an imprint of Harvard Uni versity Press), cite both as in the first example above.
If a volume has information missing (publisher, place, or date) indicate this with the abbreviations "n.
p." or "n.d"
2. Article or other work in a journal

nt
2. Ann Harrison, "Echo and her Medieval Sisters," Centennial

Review 26.4 (Fall 1982): 326-340.
MLA
White, Hayden. "Foucault Decoded: Notes from the Underground."

History and Theory 11 (1973): 23-54.
APA
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An

analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263-291.
CBE
Farber, E. and Rubin, H. 1991. Cellular adaptation in the

origin and development of cancer. Cancer Res. 51: 275-276.
ayp
Koch, Barbara Johnstone. 1983. Presentation as proof: The

language of Arabic rhetoric. Anthropological Linguisitics,
25.1: 47-60.
cd
2. Ko, K.-I., and Friedman, H. Computational complexity of real

functions. Theor. Comp. Sci. 20: 323-352; 1982.
For journals paginated by issue, not cumulatively by volume, be sure to add the issue number after the
volume. Usually do this by means of a period, as in the Harrison and Koch examples above; but in APA
style, put the issue number in par entheses. Note that APA style underlines volume number, and that it
does not abbreviate journal titles, as CBE and coding style do.
3. Article, chapter, or work an edited collection or anthology
nt
3. Richard Roderiguez, "The Achievement of Desire," in The

Essay: Old and New, ed. Edward P.J. Corbett and Sheryl L. Finkle
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Blair-Prentice Hall, 1993), 173.
MLA
MLA Goldsmith, Oliver. "The Deserted Village." The Norton

Anthology of English Literature. 5th ed. Ed. M. H. Abrams et al.
New York: Norton, 1986. 2507-2517.
APA
Salmond, A. (1974). Rituals of encounter among the Maori:

Sociolinguistic study of a scene. In R. Bauman and J.
Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations of the ethnography of speaking
(pp. 192-212). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CBE
Hanawalt, P. C. 1987. On the role of DNA damage and repair

processes in aging: Evidence for and against. In H. R.
Warner et al., editors. Modern Biological Theories of
Aging. 183-198. New York: Raven Press.
ayp
Chafe, Wallace L. 1984. Integration and involvement in spoken

and written language. In Semiotics unfolding, Tasso Borbe, ed.
Pp. 1095-1102. Berlin: Mouton.
cd
3. Eckhart, W. Polyomavirinae and their replication. In

Fundamental Virology, ed. B. N. Fields and D. M. Knipe. Ch.
29, 727-741. Raven Press: New York; 1991.
List these sources by their author, not by the collection's editor-unless you are citing the whole volume,
in which case cite by the name of the editor or editors, abbreviating "editor" or "editors" as shown.
4. Item in an unedited collection of the author's work
nt

4. D. H. Lawrence, "Tickets, Please," in Collected Stories

(London: Heinemann, 1974), 314-325.
MLA
Hazlitt, William. "On Religious Hypocrisy." In The Round Table.

London: Dent, 1964. 138-131.
APA
Geertz, C. (1883). "Art as a cultural system." Local knowledge:

Further essays in interpretive anthropology (pp. 94-120).
New York: Basic-Harper.
ayp
Gould, Steven J. 1977. History of the vertebrate brain. In Ever

since Darwin: Reflections on natural history. Pp. 186-191.
New York: Norton.
5. Article in an newspaper or magazine
nt
5. John Garamendi, "Clinton Offers a Managed Health-Care Plan,"

New York Times, 8 October 1992, late edition, A20.
MLA
Walinksky, Adam. "The Crisis of Public Order." Atlantic Monthly

July 1995: 39-54.
APA
Shales, T. (1988 July 20). The Jackson triumph. The Washington

Post, pp. C1, C6.
CBE
Margolis, M . 1988 August 12. Thousands of Amazon Acres

burning. New York Times. 12 August 1988: B1, B8.
ayp
Mattison, Alice. 1988. The flight of Andy Burns. The New

Yorker, June 20: 28-32.
cd
5. Margolis, M. Thousands of Amazon acres burning. New York

Times, 12 August 1988: B1, B6.
Don't include a volume number for newspapers or magazines. If the article is an editorial, add the word
"editorial" in brackets after the title. If it's an interview, cite it by the name of the interviewee; give the
name of the interviewer after the titl e, or after the word "Interview" if there is no title. (Note that APA
style puts "pp." before page numbers of a newspaper article or anthology item, but not of a magazine or
journal article.)
Common Variants
● No author or editor given? Start the citation with the title of the source. List the item according
to the title's first word (not counting a, an, or the).
● Two authors? Begin as follows:
nt Carla Williams and Robert O. Castle,

MLA/ayp Williams, Carla, and Robert O. Castle.
APA Williams, C., & Castle, R.O.
CBE/cd Williams, C., and Castle, R.O.
● Three authors?
nt Henri S. Witt, Albert B. Lingren, and Willard Dobbs,

MLA/ayp Witt, Henri S., Albert Lingren, and Willard Dobbs.
APA Witt, H. S., Lingren, B.H., & Dobbs, W.
CBE/cd Witt, H. S., Lingren, B.H., and Dobbs, W.
● Four or more authors?

nt Kim-Sung Moon et al., [or use "and others"]

MLA/ayp Moon, Kim-Sung, et al.
APA Moon, K.-S., Kirk, C., Sana, P., Regal, L., & Lin, D.
CBE/cd Moon, K.-S., Kirk, C., Sana, P., Regal, L., and Lin,
D.
● Repeated Author?
List entries by the same author in chronological order. In APA and CBE, repeat the author's name or
names in second and subsequent entries. In MLA, use three hyphens instead of the name or names:
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures.

NewYork: Basic Books, 1973.
---. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.
In author-year-page citing, indent the first line of a second or subsequent entry by an author three spaces,
omit the author's name, and start with year:
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday

life. New York: Doubleday.
1974. Frame analysis. New York: Harper and Row.
1981. Response cries. In Forms of Talk, 78-123. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press.
● Indirect Source?
For a source you know only as it is quoted or cited by another scholar, give full publication data for the
original source and for the other scholar, linked by the phrase "quoted in" or cited in." This e xample is
in MLA style:
Levi-Strauss, C. The Raw and the Cooked: An Introduction

to a Science of Mythology. New York: Harper & Row, 1969, 18.
Quoted in Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of
Multiple Intelligences, 103. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
● Item in a Class Sourcebook?

If the original publication data is provided and the original pagination is visible, cite the item as you
would if you found it in its original source, unless instructed otherwise. If original publication data or
pagination is missing, give what data you can, then add the sourcebook data and page references, giving
your instructor as its compiler. This example (where the original pagination was cut off in
photocopying) is in CBE style:
Kirkpatrick, M., and Ryan, M. 1991. The evolution of mating

practices and the paradox of the lek. Nature 350. In Science
B-30 Sourcebook. Comp. Jill Hurt. 125-130. Harvard University,
Fall Semester 1993.
Other Articles and Short Items
6. Article in an encyclopedia or other reference work
nt
6. John Fleming, Hugh Honour, and Nikolaus Pevsner, eds., The

Penguin Dictionary of Architecture, 2d ed. (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972), s.v. "fillet."
nt
6. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. "Magna Carta."
MLA
"Hannibal." Encyclopedia Americana. 1975.
"S.v." means sub verbo, "under the word." If the article is credited to a specific author, in MLA, add that
name to the end of your citation: "By William Ott."
7. Review or editorial
nt
7. Robert A. Huttenback, rev. of Race and Empire in British

Politics by Paul Rich, American Historical Review 93 (1988): 154.
MLA

Leys, Simon. "Balzac's Genius and Other Paradoxes." Rev. of

Balzac: A Life, by Graham Robb. The New Republic 20 December
1994. 26-7.
APA
Geiger, J. (1987, November 8). [Review of the book And the

band played on]. The New York Times Book Review, 9.
ayp
Haberman, Clyde. 1988. Review of Shotaro Ishinomori, Japan Inc:

An introduction to Japanese economics (The comic book). The
New York Times Book Review, July 3, 1988, 2.
8. Preface, introduction, foreword
nt
8. Havelock Ellis, preface to The Sexual Life of Savages, by

Bronislaw Malinowski (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), xi.
MLA
Ellis, Havelock. Preface. The Sexual Life of Savages . By

Bronislaw Malinowski. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929. vii-
xiii.
ayp
Rieff, Philip. 1963. Introduction to Sexuality and the

Psychology of Love by Sigmund Freud. Pp. 7-10. New York:
Collier-Macmillan.
9. Letter in a published collection
nt
9. Virginia Woolf, "To Emma Vaughan," 12 August 1899.

Congenial Spirits: Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf ed. Joan
Trautman Banks (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1989), 5-6

MLA
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. "To Alexander Pope." 7 September

1718.Selected Letters. Ed. Robert Halsband. New York:
Viking-Penguin, 1986.
10. Letter or papers from an archive
nt
10. Ralph Young to David Simms," 11 May 192), Ralph Waldo

Young Papers, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library,
Cambridge, Mass.
MLA
Campbell, David. Papers. Perkins Library, Duke University,

Durham, NC
Put the title of an archived item that has a title (such as a memorandum) in quotation marks. For an
interview transcript, add interviewer and date.
11. Unpublished dissertation or paper
nt
11. Yael Leah Maschler, "The games bilinguals play: A discourse

analysis of Hebrew-English bilingual conversation" (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Michigan, 1988), 23-5.
MLA
Joyce, Joseph Patrick. "An Econometric Investigation of

Government Preference Functions: The Case of Canada 1970-
1980." Diss. Boston University, 1984.
APA
Goffman, E. (1953). Communication and conduct in an island

community. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of
Chicago.

CBE
Rush, W. F. 1972. The surface brightness of reflected nebulae.

Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toledo.
ayp
Zimmer, Karl. 1958. Situational forumulas. Unpublished paper.

Linguistics Department, University of California Berkeley.
If the dissertation has been published pr microfilmed, treat it as a book (see #1), but include before the
publication data the designation "diss.", the university, and the year. Note that APA underlines even an
unpublished dissertation.
Other Books
12. Book with an author and an editor
nt
12. W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New

York: Vintage, 1979), 79.
MLA
Forster, E. M. Commonplace Book. Ed. Philip Gardner. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1985.
APA
Freud, S. (1971). The psychopathology of everyday life. Ed. J.

Strachey. New York: Norton.
13. Book in several volumes
nt
13. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land, 2 vols. (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), 1: 90.

MLA
Orwell, George. Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters. 4

vols. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. London: Secker and
Warburg, 1970.
APA
Field, J. (Ed.). (1960). Handbook of Physiology (Vol. 3).

Washington, DC: American Physiological Society.
14. Reprinted book
nt
14. Brooker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography

(1901; rpt. New York: Doubleday Page, 1978), 34.
MLA
Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. 1927. New York:
Washington Square, 1969.
APA
Allport, G. W. (1979). The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA:

Addison Wesley. (Original work published 1954.)
ayp
Sacks, Oliver. [1973] 1983. Awakenings. New York: Dutton.
Aspects of the Feminine,
trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series 20, Vol. 27 (Princeton:

Princeton University Press), 85-100. MLA
Peterson, Margaret. Wallace Stevens and the Idealist Tradition.

Studies in Modern Literature 24. Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1983.

APA
Markman, E. (1989). Categorization and naming in children:

Problems of Induction. Series in Learning, Development, and
Conceptual Change. Cambridge, MA: Bradford-MIT.
ayp
Tannen, Deborah. 1989. Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue,

and imagery in conversational discourse. Studies in
Interactional Sociolinguisitics 6, ed. John J. Gumpertz.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
If a series editor is listed, supply the name after the series name, as in the Tannen example.
16. Translated book (or portion thereof) nt
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter

Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 86.
MLA
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. "The Origin of Civil Society." The

Origin of Civil Society: Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau.
Ed. Sir Ernest Baker. Trans. Gerald Hopkins. New York: Oxford
UP, 1947. 212-268.
APA
Durkheim, E. (1957). Suicide. (J. A. Spaulding & G. Simpson,

Trans.). Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
ayp
Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The sacred and the profane: The nature
of religion. Trans. by Willard Trask. New York: Harvest-
Harcourt.
17. Government publication
nt

17. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the

United States: Colonial Times to 1870, (Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1975), 185.
APA
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (1990). Healthy

people: The surgeon general's report on health promotion and
disease prevention (PHS Publication No. 79-55071).
Washington DC: Author.
18. Book by a group or corporate author
nt
18. American Historical Association, Guide to Historical

Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 135.
CBE
American Institute of Physics. 1990. AIP style manual. 4th ed.

New York: American Institute of Physics.
Other Sources
19. Class lecture, conference paper, speech, or performance
nt
19. Helen Vendler, lecture on Robert Lowell, English 182,

Harvard University, Cambridge Mass., 12 November 1993.
MLA
Othello. By William Shakespeare. Newtown Players. Dir. Jill

Davies. Lyttle Theatre, Cambridge, MA. 3 June 1963.
APA
Waters, M. (1993, April 20). Local lore. [Address to the

Cambridge Ethnographic Society.] Cambridge, MA.
ayp
Whitaker, Harry. 1982. Automaticity. Paper presented at the

Conference on Formulaicity. Linguistic Institute, University
of Maryland, July 1982.
Performances may also be listed by their playwright, composer, or individual artist, followed by an
abbreviation indicating role (e.g. "cond." "dir." "chor.").
20. Personal or phone interview, letter, or e-mail
nt
20. Edgar Bowers, e-mail to the author, 5 September 1990.
MLA
Rice, Betina. Telephone interview. 6 March 1993.
21. Legal case
nt
21. Cramer v. United States, 324 U.S. 1 (1944), 46.
MLA
Watson v. Dunhill Inc. 135 USPQ 88. 2d Cir 1967.
List cases by title; give also volume number and abbreviated name of reporting service, starting page-
number in the volume, court that decided the case, and year. Consult the Uniform System of Citation
cited under "law" in Appendi x C.
22. Artwork, illustration, or cartoon
MLA
Kollwitz, KŠthe. Home Worker. Los Angeles County Museum,

Los Angeles.

If reproduced in a book, add after the period:
Plate 107 of Women Artists 1550-1950. Ed. Anne Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin.
New York: Knopf, 1981.
23. Musical recording or score
nt
23. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Magic Flute, Vienna

Philhamonic, cond. George Solti, DM-3988, Decca, 1970.
MLA
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. The Magic Flute. Cond. George Solti.

Vienna Philharmonic. With Pilar Lorengar, Stuart Burrows, and
Herman Prey. Decca, DM-3988, 1970.
List by conductor or performer, instead of composer, if appropriate to the focus of your paper. For a
published musical score, replace performance and production data with the score's place of publication,
publisher, and year.
24. Film or video
nt
24. Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa, with Toshiro

Mifune, Daiei, 1959.
MLA
In the Trenches. Videocassete. Dir. Lionel Askins. Narr.

Albert Hamel. Cityfilm, 1992.
List by the name of a performer or director, instead of title, if your paper considers that individual's work.
CITING ELECTRONIC MEDIA

Conventions for citing online sources may not be fixed for some time, given the pace of change in
information technology. The recent advent of the World Wide Web, for example, has al ready
changed radically the way most users of the Internet access sources. But the fact that electronic
sources can be pulled into your paper with dangerous ease, and that technology has also made it
easier for readers to follow up on and benefit from sou rces used by others, you make you all the
more diligent to acknowledge online sources carefully and give enough information to retrieve them.
Begin a citation, in APA, CBE, or ayp style, by giving the author's name, date of publication, and title
of item and any volume that includes it; in note or MLA style, put the title in the middle and the date
third. Then in brackets define the me dium of the source, usually "Online" or "CD-ROM," plus a
descriptor: e.g. [online: web], [CD-ROM database], [online: USENET], [online journal]. Last, after a
period, give the location at which the source is available. For a source on an infor mation service or
database, give the name of the service or database (e.g. ERIC, LEXIS, EconLIT, Dissertation
Abstracts Online), the pertinent directory (if any), and a file name or item number. For a source on
the Internet, give its Universal Resource Locator (URL), which includes, first, the means you used to
access the Net (e.g. http, ftp, gopher, Telnet); then the computer hosting the information; then a path
through its directories; and finally (in most cases) a filename. Use slashes to demarcate elements in a
location statement.
Electronic texts that are subject to erasure, such as contributions to newsgroups or bulletin boards,
generally don't make good sources, since they usually can't be retrieved by others-although one
valuable function of these groups is to exchange information about sources. "FAQ" files (frequently
asked questions) that newsgroups compile are sometimes preserved; if you find ideas or information
relevant to your topic in an archived FAQ, cite it by compiler, if given, otherwise by item title (see
#28). But if you come across pertinent information or ideas that have been posted by a discussant in
the group, the best procedure is to have that person send the posting to you as a personal e-mail
communication, which you can then cite as such and either append to your paper or say is available
upon request.
Mechanics
● If you cite an online article, give its length (in screens, paragraphs, or lines, if unpaginated). If
you refer to a particular passage in a long document, give its paragraph or line number.
● If you cite a source that has been or may be altered (including a Web site), give as its publication
date the date of its last update (if known), and include the date that you accessed the source for
citing.
● Always put a space after the descriptor "URL:" but don't separate elements within in a URL with
spaces. f you can't get a URL on a single line, always break it immediately after a slash.
● Don't end an electronic address with a period. Where your citation requires you to set apart
elements in the location of a database, use two or three spaces instead of period-as in examples
26 and 27 below.
● Be sure to retain, in an electronic address, the source's use of lowercase or uppercase letters.

Note: The following formats are not included in the Chicago, MLA, or CBE manuals. They are rather
post-World Wide Web adaptations based on the styles of those manuals. Your instructor may prefer a
different format: ask.
25. Work, article, information, or graphic on the Internet
nt
27. Conrad J. Bladey, "The potato famine in history" [online: web],

updated 12 May 1995, cited 21 Aug.1995, para 6. URL:
http://www.intl.net/cksmith/famine/history.html
MLA
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Bullen's Stratford Town

Edition. n.d. [Online book]. URL: Telnet://Library.Dartmouth.edu/
Shakespeare Plays/Hamlet
MLA
"Burp." Oxford English Dictionary. 2d ed. 1971. [Online

book]. URL: Telnet://UWIN.U.WASHINGTON.EDU/I/REF/OED/burp
APA
Brin, D. (1993). The good and the bad: Outlines of tomorrow.

[Online: web]. Cited 5 Sept. 1995. URL: HTTP://kspace.com/
KM/spot.sys/Brin/pages/piece1.html
CBE
Whitesides, G., Celotta, R. Zoller, P., Phillips W., and

Prentiss, M. 1995. Manipulating matter with light: Report
to the special emphasis panel for NSF grant no. PHY-9312572.
[Online: web]. Cited 5 Sept.1995. URL:
http://atomsum.harvard.edu/lightforce/site_review/
ayp
Carroll, L. 1991. Alice's adventures in wonderland.

Millenium Fulcrum edn. [Online book]. URL:

ftp//quake.think.com/pub/etext/1991/alice-in-wonderland.txt
26. Text from an information service or database
APA
Niles, T.M.T. (1992, August 17). US position and proposed actions

concerning the Yugoslav crisis. Department of State Dispatch
[Online database]. LEXIS Library: GENFED File: DSTATE
ayp
Gibbs, Raymond W, Jr. 1986. Spilling the beans on understanding

and memory for idioms in conversation. Memory and
Cognition 8:2: 149-56. [Online database]. ERIC EJ 343357.
In the case of an unpublished conference paper, give its date before the reference number.
27. Abstract from an information service or database
nt
27. Paul S. Green,"Fashion colonialism: French export Marie

Claire makes in-roads," Advertising Age, 23 October 1989, 10,
[CD-ROM database]. Abstract from: ABI/INFORM Item:89-44170
APA
Baldwin, D. 1994. The mindreading engine: Evaluating the

evidence for modularity. Cahiers de psychologie cognitive,
13 (5), 553-560. [Online database]. Abstract from:
PsychINFO 78-2366
28. Contribution to an electronic newsgroup or bulletin board
MLA
Smith, Kim, comp. FAQ for talk.politics.libertarian, sec. 6.

[Online: archived USENET FAQ]. URL: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/
usenet-by-group/Libertarian_Party_FAQ_statment-of-principles

Many FAQ's from USENET groups are archived on this MITcomputer.

APPENDIX C
APPENDIX C
FURTHER INFORMATION
General
Turabian, Kate L. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and

Dissertations. 5th ed. Ed. Bonnie Birtwistle Honigsblum. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987.
University of Chicago Press. The Chicago Manual of Style. 14th ed.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Biological Sciences
Council of Biology Editors. Scientific Style and Format: CBE Style Manual
for Authors, Editors, and Publishers in the Biological Sciences. 6th ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Chemistry
Dodd, Janet S., ed. The ACS Style Guide. Washington, D C: American
Chemical Society, 1986.
Earth Sciences
Cochran, Wendell, Peter Fenner, and Mary Hill, eds. Geowriting: A Guide
to Writing, Editing, and Printing in Earth Sciences. Alexandria, Va.:
American Geological Institute, 1984.
Education
National Education Association. NEA Style Manual for Writers and Editors.
Rev. ed. Washington, DC: Author, 1974.
English and Other Literatures
Gibaldi, Joseph and Walter S. Achert, eds. MLA Handbook for Writers of
Research Papers. 4th. ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995.
Government Documents
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources/app_c.html (1 of 2)3/29/2004 8:34:26 PM

APPENDIX C
Garner, Diane L., and Diane H. Smith. The Complete Guide to Citing Government
Documents: A Manual for Writers and Librarians. Bethesda, MD. Congressional
Information Service, 1984.
Law
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. Comp. editors of

Columbia Law Review et al. 15th ed. Cambridge: Harvard Law Review
Association, 1991.
Mathematics
American Mathematical Society. A Manual for Authors of Mathematical

Papers. Rev. ed. Providence, RI: Author, 1990.
Medicine
Patrias, Karen. National Library of Medicine Recommended Formats for

Bibliographical Citation. Bethesda, MD: U.S. Dept of Health and
Human Services, 1991.
Physics
American Institute of Physics. AIP Style Manual. 4th ed. New York:
Author, 1990.
Political Science
Kelly, Jean P. et al., eds. Style Manual for Political Science.

Rev. ed. Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1985.
Psychology
American Psychological Association. Publication Manual of the American

Psychological Association. 4th ed. Washington, DC: Author, 1994.
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources/app_c.html (2 of 2)3/29/2004 8:34:26 PM

FN 2, Chap3
See for example John Ciardi, Good Words to You (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 225 and Lance
Morrow, "Kidnapping the Brainchildren," Time 3 December, 1990: 126.
Back to the text
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources/fn2.chap3.html3/29/2004 8:35:32 PM
FN3, Chap3
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Handbook for Students 1995-96 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University,
19 95), 286.
Back to the text
FN4 Chap3
The Administrative Board of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and the Student-Faculty Judicial Board: A
User's Guide for Students 1994-95 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1994), 20.
BAck to the text

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Writing with Sources

Writing with Sources

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3. In-text style for the social sciences and sciences

List of Text Boxes

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1 Scientists distinguish between "proximate" and "ultimate"

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19 send by smoking and drinking creates an image of a strutting

20 I'm strong and I'm superior. Even to take drugs once or

25 An apparent problem with this ultimate, evolutionary explanation of

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When she paraphrases this sentence in Diamond's book:

It seems to me that Zahavi's theory applies to many costly

risky human actions, including the use of drugs, are

MENTIONING A TITLE IN YOUR PAPER

1.2 Rules for Quoting

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1.3 Quoting Blocks

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The basic rules for quoting blocks are these:

1.4 Using Discursive Notes

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another paper. But you may sometimes wish to do the following:

6. These differences are not small: in 1990 the US

12. The use of the word "smelly" in this passage is

(b) announce a non-standard edition or your own translating:

3. All translations from Pasteur are my own; I use the

5. See chapter 3 of George Folsom's Rectitudes

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2. Unless otherwise noted, references to Locke are to

3. Dickinson's poems are cited by their number in the

4. In this paper NK will refer to a natural cell-

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WHEN QUOTING OR CITING A PASSAGE YOU FOUND QUOTED OR CITED BY

2.2 When Not to Cite

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2.3 Methods of Citing

Diamond suggests that humans share the same "unconscious

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7. Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and

Physiologist Jared Diamond proposes that self-destructive

This uses author-year style:

Recent explanations suggest that such actions are

And this uses author-year-page style:

Diamond (1992: 196) has proposed that self-destructive human

Diamond, Jared. The Third Chimpanzee: The Future and

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Diamond, J. (1992). The third chimpanzee: The future and

Recent explanations have suggested that such actions are

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2.4 Acknowledging Uncited Sources

1. My understanding of Reconstruction is influenced by my reading of W. J. Cash's Mind

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