Citation (part 1)

A citation or bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other published item with sufficient details to identify the item uniquely. Unpublished writings or speech, such as working papers or personal communications, are also sometimes cited. Citations are provided in scholarly works, bibliographies and indexes. The word citation may also mean: the act of citing a work, that is, providing a reference to the work in the form of a bibliographic citation.

There are so many types of citation, here are some of them: the ACS style, the APA style, the MHRA Style Guide is the Modern Humanities Research Association, etc. I am going to choose one type, in this case I am going to talk about MLA style, that is developed by The Modern Language Association, and is the one used in English Studies, comparative literature, foreign-language literary criticism, and some other fields in the humanities.

Why I have choose this one? Because I am studying humanities, English Studies, and because in case of using one of the citations styles, I am going to use this one and probably not any other.

Let’s see first the purpose of this style, taken from the Wikipedia:

This style is addressed primarily to academic scholars, professors, graduate students, and other advanced-level writers of scholarly books and articles in humanities disciplines such as English and other modern languages and literatures. Many journals and presses in these disciplines require that manuscripts be submitted following MLA style. As we can see this is the perfect style for people like me: books, English and other modern languages, and literature. It is perfect for all of us, studying English or Basque Studies.

And… how to do the citation and the bibliography format? Let’s see it:

In-text citations:

- When citing a work within the text of a paper, try to mention the material being cited in a “signal phrase” that includes the author’s name. After that phrase, insert in brackets, the page number in the work referred to from which the information is drawn. For example:

In his final study, Lopez said that the response “far exceeded our expectations” (253).

- If the author is not mentioned in a “signal phrase” the author’s name, followed by the page number, must appear in parentheses. Example:

The habits of England’s workers changed dramatically during the Industrial Revolution (Hodgkinson 81).

- If you are citing an entire work, or one without page numbers (or only one page), write just the author’s name in parentheses.

Your bibliography may, of course, contain more than one work by an author. If the text preceding your citation does not specify which work you are referencing, place a comma after the author’s name, followed by a shortened version of the title in question (or the entire title if it is short) and the page number. This is typically the first word or two of the title:

Securing its communications through the Suez Canal was Britain’s overriding aim (Smith, Islam 71).

- With the title italicized for a book or within quotation marks for an essay, a poem, or a speech, as appropriate. (In the “Works Cited” or bibliography, three short dashes [––– if word processed; hyphens (---) when typed] are used when the author or authors’ name is the same in subsequent works being listed. These in-text parenthetical citations guide the reader to the pertinent entries in the attached list of “Works Cited”:

Hodgkinson, Tom. How to Be Idle. 2004. New York: Harper, 2005.

Smith, Charles D. “The ‘Crisis of Orientation’: The Shift of Egyptian Intellectuals to Islamic Subjects in the 1930s.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1973): 382–410.