Citing ACTA in MLA7 format
March 16, 2012 12:46 PM Subscribe
How do I cite the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in MLA7 format? I can't find it the State Department's Treaties and Other International Acts Series, probably because it was only signed this year. Full text of the treaty.
Because MLA7 doesn't have specific instructions for international treaties, I looked to the internet for guidelines. These were the only straightforward ones I could find. Are those guidelines correct? If so, what should I do considering that the 2012 edition hasn't been published yet? (And if not... now what?)
Because MLA7 doesn't have specific instructions for international treaties, I looked to the internet for guidelines. These were the only straightforward ones I could find. Are those guidelines correct? If so, what should I do considering that the 2012 edition hasn't been published yet? (And if not... now what?)
Best answer: I Am a Gov Docs Librarian (though not your govdocs librarian). Citation is not my favorite thing so take this with a grain of salt and always run it by your instructor first.
Here's what I tell students about citing things: the entire point of a citation is to get your reviewer back to the source which you read and cited, right? Right. So, if your source for the ACTA treaty was the Canadian PDF link (I'm assuming from the Wikipedia citation? Incidentally, you'd be smarter if you cited it from the PDF here because that's where the official US link for ACTA goes to), that's what you cite.
ACTA seems a bit tricky because it's multi-national but explicitly not multi-agency. Note that it's actually the Ambassador of the Office of the US Trade Representative, coming out of the Executive Office and not State, that signed this. See their link for more.
So, you're going to have to bend the rules a little to make this work. Note that I'm melding the suggestions on how to cite an international treaty with the suggestions for how to cite an electronic resource, because that's the best way to emulate how you found your source. As usual when doing things like this, you should probably run your final citation by your instructor (especially if they're the picky type).
posted by librarylis at 6:24 PM on March 16, 2012
Here's what I tell students about citing things: the entire point of a citation is to get your reviewer back to the source which you read and cited, right? Right. So, if your source for the ACTA treaty was the Canadian PDF link (I'm assuming from the Wikipedia citation? Incidentally, you'd be smarter if you cited it from the PDF here because that's where the official US link for ACTA goes to), that's what you cite.
ACTA seems a bit tricky because it's multi-national but explicitly not multi-agency. Note that it's actually the Ambassador of the Office of the US Trade Representative, coming out of the Executive Office and not State, that signed this. See their link for more.
So, you're going to have to bend the rules a little to make this work. Note that I'm melding the suggestions on how to cite an international treaty with the suggestions for how to cite an electronic resource, because that's the best way to emulate how you found your source. As usual when doing things like this, you should probably run your final citation by your instructor (especially if they're the picky type).
United States. Office of the United States Trade Representative. "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)." Tokyo, Japan: 2011. Web. 13 March 2011. [or whatever date you accessed this thing when writing your paper]URLS are now optional when citing an electronic resource in MLA but I would strongly suggest that you add it in this case considering part of the controversy with this thing is how hard it was to find the full text. The URL would be in the above citation but AskMeta and I are disagreeing on how to format it.
posted by librarylis at 6:24 PM on March 16, 2012
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posted by smirkette at 1:04 PM on March 16, 2012