Barbara Eberhard's Blog - Posts Tagged "citations"
Citations
Today, I spent the first hour of "writing" updating the endnotes in Dad's biography to be formal citations, instead of just hyperlinks to websites or my notes so I would remember where the information came from. I haven't done formal citations since graduate school in 1985. And there was no such thing as websites in those days. So, I actually wasn't sure how to do website citations.
I had been kind of hoping I could just find some app that would go through all the websites and convert them to citations. To be honest, such a thing may or may not exist.
But instead, I used Grammarly. It worked very well for articles and books I'd found through searches.
The only challenge I've found has been, while a lot of the entries on the websites have attribution for the author, many do not. Grammarly didn't have guidance for when there's no author. It also wanted me to put "n.d." for no date, which seemed odd to me. So, I used my best judgment about how to cite a more "generic" page. I think I've gotten to a good place, but it was a bit of a guess.
Another thing I'm going to have to look up is how to cite from personal correspondence or interviews I've conducted. Again, I've come up with my own format for these things in the absence of other sources; Grammarly doesn't have anything on this kind of source material. The reason this is important is I'd like this biography to eventually get published by a publishing house, so I'm trying to do things in the "right way", to make the manuscript look professional - even though I'm obviously not a professional biographer.
Likewise, I'm struggling with how to do repeat citations. Grammarly and other editorial sites said you can use "ibid", which I remember from college and graduate school, if the citation is one that immediately follows the same source. But I remember "opcit" for when it was a citation of a source used before but not immediately above. And neither Grammarly nor other sources had this. Instead, they recommended "Reference #, Page #". I suppose that will work, but it means I have to wait until I'm done with the writing to know what the Reference # should be.
Bottom line is I've converted most of the endnotes to actual citations at this point. But doing so definitely took me back to almost 40 years ago.
I had been kind of hoping I could just find some app that would go through all the websites and convert them to citations. To be honest, such a thing may or may not exist.
But instead, I used Grammarly. It worked very well for articles and books I'd found through searches.
The only challenge I've found has been, while a lot of the entries on the websites have attribution for the author, many do not. Grammarly didn't have guidance for when there's no author. It also wanted me to put "n.d." for no date, which seemed odd to me. So, I used my best judgment about how to cite a more "generic" page. I think I've gotten to a good place, but it was a bit of a guess.
Another thing I'm going to have to look up is how to cite from personal correspondence or interviews I've conducted. Again, I've come up with my own format for these things in the absence of other sources; Grammarly doesn't have anything on this kind of source material. The reason this is important is I'd like this biography to eventually get published by a publishing house, so I'm trying to do things in the "right way", to make the manuscript look professional - even though I'm obviously not a professional biographer.
Likewise, I'm struggling with how to do repeat citations. Grammarly and other editorial sites said you can use "ibid", which I remember from college and graduate school, if the citation is one that immediately follows the same source. But I remember "opcit" for when it was a citation of a source used before but not immediately above. And neither Grammarly nor other sources had this. Instead, they recommended "Reference #, Page #". I suppose that will work, but it means I have to wait until I'm done with the writing to know what the Reference # should be.
Bottom line is I've converted most of the endnotes to actual citations at this point. But doing so definitely took me back to almost 40 years ago.
