Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with citations

How to edit citations

quidividi — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 05:34:20 -0800

Footnote filter: I am writing a non-fiction, non-academic book and need help determining what to include in my citations. The book contains information and data from newspapers, magazines, wire services, governments, academic papers and first-hand interviews. There are very few direct quotes.

I’m using Zotero to manage my citations, which will appear as end notes. I’ve been diligent about citing information so that I can a) trace my sources, b) give credit where it’s due and c) allow readers to dig deeper.

Now I would like to pare the citations down, so that I meet objectives b) and c) without making the end notes unmanageable.

For example, I have a 2,500-word section with 78 citations. That includes citations for information that I would characterize as (for lack of a better phrase) common knowledge, such as when baby boomers will start retiring, or news reports that would have appeared in many media outlets. Eight of the citations are for data from a government handbook.

Can I safely omit these “common knowledge” citations? And can I use a blanket citation for the data from the government handbook?

(Thanks to NYCinephiles for the link to plagerism.com in this thread)

Is it possible to do a global change-style in Excel?

min — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:41:44 -0800

Is it possible to automate a citation style change on an entire column in Excel, or do I need to do this by hand? I have a list of approximately 600 articles in an Excel document. There is a column for each field in the cite (author, title, journal, etc). I need to change the citation style. Currently, most cites are Smith, A. B., Jones, C. D., and a few are Smith Ann B, Jones Cathy D. I need to covert them to Smith AB, Jones CD. Most titles (but not all) are in the format Where the wild things are: a great book, but they need to be formatted as Where the Wild Things are: A great book. (Think PubMed style, with proper nouns and the word after a colon capitalized.) Is it possible to do some sort of global change citation style, or do I need to do all this by hand? Is this the kind of thing you can do with a Macro? I haven't ever set one up before. Unfortunately, importing into EndNote or a similar program that will automatically change format style isn't an option.

I'm using Excel 2001 on a Mac. I'm not a programmer. I'm looking for something that will do this relatively quickly, because I could do it by hand in a (very boring) few hours--if the solution involves hours of learning it's probably not that practical.

Name that citation please!

Mrs Mutant — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:01:43 -0800

Original citation for the quote "What gets measured gets managed?" This is often attributed to Peter Drucker, but we've seen it attributed to other names informally (Welch, et al).

Can anyone provide an academic citation; e.g., book or journal title, date, etc for this quote? Lots of web sites present the quote, but none (that we've looked at) cite the source. Its just one of those things that "everyone knows".

Not convinced Drucker originally said it. And even if he did, we can't find a citation.

Teaching students to cite

carter — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:20:08 -0800

Desperately seeking effective online learning resources that teach undergrads how to identify academic sources, and how to cite them correctly. These could be Web pages, .docs/.pdfs, tutorials, etc. Anything interactive is a bonus. I've gone through this a number of times with different classes. I've told them, basically, that they need to supply some form of:

Lastname, N., (DATE). Book title, or Title & Journal/Vol/Issue, or Title & Conference/ Name/Place/Location, pagenumbers. Place/Publisher where relevant.

And I keep getting back the most amazing garbage. I'm flummoxed, tired of explaining it, and want to point them to a good online, preferably interactive Web resource. Many thanks!

What software is helpful for writing a masters thesis?

metricfan — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:30:12 -0800

What software is helpful for writing a masters thesis? I'm working my thesis for my M.A. and I have a non-tablet PC and use OneNote a lot. What are some helpful computer programs or tips for doing research?

Here are the things I need right now:

I really need a program to allow me to take notes on PDFs directly. It seems like most of my reading is on here, and I need to be able to write in the margins like I do with actual printed things. I am broke, so I was hoping for a free program/under 30-ish dollars. Someone asked this question like two years ago, and there was not real answer.

Also, how can I import a PDF in OneNote? Actually, any tips for OneNote would be amazing.

I need a good citation program or something because Refworks has turned out to be a bust.

Is Evernote really good?

Any advice or tips are welcome.

About my thesis: I'm a communication studies ma student, and I'm writing about popular culture and politics. Specifically, I am using Barry Brummett's mosaic method in his book Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture to analyze TDS and other news media surrounding Obama's race speech.

SO! If you have any research suggestions for that, that's cool too. Though, as a masters student I've taken the fundamental classes like classical rhetoric, so really abstractly related things like Aristotle's On Rhetoric (unless with a specific link to my project) I don't really need to hear.

I appreciate the help, thanks in advance.

MLA Citations of Emails, Online Records

Awkward Philip — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:21:09 -0800

What is the proper MLA citation format (parenthetical and works cited list) for these internet-related sources? - an email exchange between myself and another person
- records obtained from a geneology website (passenger logs, divorce records, etc.)
- an article published online that is a revised version of a print magazine article

Using Word2007/2003 to make a bibliography

mateuslee — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:01:44 -0800

Word 2007 vs. 2003: It's complicated to go back-and-forth! Help me write my dissertation, please! So, I'm a grad student working tirelessly on my dissertation. At home I work with Word 2007 and at the university I'm using 2003. I just started using the citation mechanism in 2007, inputted a few books, and really started to get the hang of this as a useful too. However, as you probably know, when I switch to 2003 (I have the converter installed), all those citations are converted to static text.

Is there any way around this?
If not, what free software do you reccomend for standardizing citations and keeping them in a database?

Sure do appreciate any thoughts...
Thanks a lot!

Can reference retrieval not suck?

norabarnacl3 — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:51:18 -0800

Is there a (free) application/widget/method to automate the process of retrieving academic articles from university's online access to journals? The way it works now is I will be reading usually a pdf of an article that will cite a particular reference, say Nature volume x etc. To retrieve that reference I have to navigate to my university's library's webpage, search for the journal title, log in through the University proxy, and then on the journal webpage I have to navigate through the volume/issue listings to find the particular cite.

Anyway to make this not suck?

I read it for the articles. No, really. Just help me find them again.

marylynn — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:53:27 -0800

Please help me find a way to electronically organize my magazine article collection. I read a crazy number of magazines and have a habit of pulling articles out to save them for later. So far, they're just filed away on paper but I'd like to organize them electronically and I'd like to store them online if possible (and if I could do it without making them searchable so as to avoid any copyright problems).

I've looked at various academic bibliographic reference managers but none seem quite ... friendly?... enough or have exactly the features I need (or are prohibitively expensive), particularly the one below about uploading the document itself.

Features I'd like:
- ease of citation entry (I would probably have to enter these manually as the cites aren't coming from dbs)
- web-based, though I will consider local software I'd like to be able to access this info from anywhere if I can
- ability to create both URL links to articles (some of what I read it on the web) and to stored PDFs (which I'd upload and preferably not make searchable outside of my domain) - sometimes both
- tags or keywords
- ability to customize the interface display. Since most of what I'm saving are magazine or literary journal pieces some of the citation fields for scientific literature aren't useful to me
- ability to enter in some kind of abstract

So far the closest one I can find to fit my needs is RefBase and while I'm not keen on installing and maintaing the software I have a hosting package that might let me do it. If anyone has any experience using this, I'd be glad to hear of it. I've read the other threads on this I can find but they seem geared more towards the "scientific literature" needs of academics than my own "now what did I do with that article from Vanity Fair...?" more writerly needs.

I guess I just hope that someone has made a super simple, clean interface "writer's" version of the Endnote for less than $100. Well, have they? Or is there some other solution I'm not thinking of?

Help me cite a reference.

nile_red — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 18:21:33 -0800

Help me with citing a reference. I need to cite a reference that references someone else, and I don't have the original published work to go pull the information from. Here's the bit I'm using: "[T]he Bengal fan…is largely cut off from its supply of sediment and…the modern river sediments are trapped on the Bengal shelf as a result of the Holocene transgression (Curray and Moore, 1974; Curray et al., 1982; Emmel and Curray, 1985)."

However this is coming from an article in Issue 12 of Geology Magazine from 1989. Do I cite the author of the article in Geology, or do I find the author's reference and cite the original 1974 reference?

Where do I find out about a traffic citation issued to me in the state of Texas?

nickerbocker — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 16:27:49 -0800

Where do I find out about a traffic citation issued to me in the state of Texas? I was driving through Texas back in July, on my way to Austin. I got pulled over for speeding 85/75 and received a traffic citation for the violation. I haven't had the money to pay the ticket off until now, and now I can't find the citation. I can't remember what county it was in, but it was issued by a state sharif. I'm located out of that state, but would still like to keep my record clean, and certainly don't want any trouble if ever I return to the state of Texas.

Side Question: do you think there will be any late fees for waiting so long to pay it?

Thank you for your time.

Second-degree citations in MLA

punishinglemur — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 17:11:52 -0800

MLA Citation Filter: The information I'm citing was found on a website. However, the person who made the website did not create this information. The information I'm putting into my paper is all from articles cited on the website; it's either a direct quote from the journal article that I copied and pasted from the website, or it's factual information from the articles that is presented and cited by the website author.

In my paper's bibliography, how should I cite the copied portions of journal articles? How should I cite the facts from the journal articles that are presented by the website's author? Do I cite the journal article, or the website?