A guide to citing Internet resources
| Published date | 01 March 1996 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040612 |
| Pages | 35-39 |
| Date | 01 March 1996 |
| Author | Phil Cross |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
A
guide
to
citing
Internet resources
by Phil Cross, former Subject
Librarian (Applied Psychology,
Computing, Electronics),
Bournemouth University
Staff at
Boumemouth
University Library &
Information Services had been receiving requests
from students for guidance on how to cite sources
of information found on the
Internet.
No standards
yet
exist,
although there are many suggestions to
be found on the Web
itself.
We decided to put
together a set of recommendations based
on those
suggestions
that seemed most likely to be
adopted by
the
UK information
community.
The
article
describes
the chosen
style,
gives advice for
finding the information required for producing a
reference and discusses some of the issues
involved,
both for
those
wishing to cite online
sources and those responsible for producing them.
Introduction
In 1996, Bournemouth University Library
&
Information Services (BULIS) began
to be
asked
by students
how
they should cite sources
of
infor-
mation found
on
the Internet. This coincided with
Bournemouth's full connection
to the
SuperJANET
network
and is
doubtless
a
question being asked
in
university libraries around the country.
One answer might
be
that students shouldn't
be
citing such sources; they
are
often transient
and,
much more often,
not of
a quality that
is
suitable
for
citing
in a
piece
of
academic work. This
was
indeed
a
response
I
received from
one
member
of
staff
at
Bournemouth.
However, this
is a
short-sighted view.
In my
experience the amount
of
valuable information
on
the Internet
has
increased significantly over the last
three years
or so
that
I've
been using
it, and has
been made more accessible
by
significant advances
in
the
power
of
the search engines found
on the
Web.
There
is
also much interest
in the
develop-
ment of electronic
journals;
electronic article
pre-prints have become
an
established method
for
disseminating research material quickly; there
is a
proliferation of mailing lists and newsgroups which
can contain useful information;
and
researchers
are
themselves beginning
to
produce their own
Web
pages with information about work they
are
con-
ducting, often including copies of their own papers.
Unfortunately, information
is
stored
in an
unstruc-
tured manner, producing problems
for
information
retrieval,
and is
surrounded
by
large quantities
of
irrelevant or questionable data, requiring the user
to
adopt sound methods
for
determining
the
value and
authenticity of the information found.
Despite this,
it is now
quite necessary
to be
able
to
cite information from
the
Internet
in
some standard
manner and
the
need will only increase over
the
coming years.
Clearly there are problems
to
citing online materials
unique to the medium. Their potentially ephemeral
nature
and the
ease with which they
can be
amended make citations uncertain,
and the
lack
of
standard guidelines
for
indicating such amendments
or even the responsibility
for
the document, such
as
exist with traditional printed materials, serves
to
make life more difficult
for
the citer.
However,
the
basic elements
of
citation styles
for
printed sources
can be
applied with little change
to
online documents,
and
the adoption
of
the Internet
addressing system,
the
URL, provides
a
very useful
means for uniquely identifying them.
Devising
a
citation style
As
no
standard
for
citing sources
of
information
on
the Internet existed,
the
Academic Support Group
within BULIS decided
to put
together some recom-
mendations based
on
those systems being
discussed
at the
time
and
which seemed most likely
to be adopted by
the
information community.
To
this
end,
Karen Towle
and I
based
a set of
recom-
mendations largely upon the 2nd edition of Xia Li
and Nancy
B.
Crane's book: Electronic style:
a
guide
to
citing electronic information,
and the
ISO draft standard 690-2.
At the time of producing
our
guidelines,
Li and
Crane's book
had not yet
been published
and I did
not have access
to the
full, printed version
of
the
draft standard.
I
consequently used excerpts from
both available on
the
Internet
itself(1)&(2).
VINE 104
—
35
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