GEO 101 World Human Geography
Spring 2008
Guide to citing sources for World Human Geography

In essay assignments for this class we ask you to draw upon the articles to help support your arguments.  Standards of academic honesty require that when you quote directly from a text you must use quotation marks and cite the source. When you paraphrase or use one or more of another’s ideas you must indicate the source and give the exact page or pages from which the ideas or paraphrasing were taken. If you do not cite your sources, the implication is that you came up with the idea.  You are not expected to do original research in this class, but rather to use and explain the ideas of others in support of your own arguments. Citations help to bolster your argument by allowing your reader to go back to the source to read the same evidence that you have. More information on quoting and paraphrasing.

Geographers tend to use the author date method of citing sources.  There are two components to this system: in text citations and a works cited section at the end of the document.

In text citations
Citations are placed in parentheses within the text and consist of the author’s last name, the year of publication, and for specific quotes or paraphrases page numbers.  Note that the period for the end of the sentence comes after the citation. Becuse page numbers are sometimes not availalbe for electronic sources include the section heading (if there is one) and the number of the paragraph following it in order to help your reader locate the quote in the original.

Works Cited
A “Works Cited” section at the end of the paper allows the reader to use the author and date to identify the particular source.  This method provides a quick way assess the sources that have been used in an article. While you will probably be using only a few sources for this class, it is important for you to learn and practice proper methods of academic citation. 

Examples:
The following are some examples:

Quotation: "This crabgrass apartheid, represented by blockaded streets and off-limits parks, should be as intolerable as Jim Crow drinking fountains or segregated schools were in the 1960s" (Davis and Moctezuma 1999: Tercera Frontera section, para. 16).

Paraphrase:  The informal apartheid-like conditions in Los Angeles should be as unaceptable as formal segregation was in the 1960s (Davis and Moctezuma 1999).

A Variation: 

A subsequent citation from the same source:  If you subsequently cite a quote from the same source and same page, rather than using a full citation you may use the abbreviation ibid. which means in the same place.  If it is from the same source but a different page you can use ibid. with a page number.  Typically if you are paraphrasing several ideas from the same source it is not necessary to use ibid. as long as it is understood that you are still talking about the same soure. For example:

Davis and Moctezuma (1999) argue that the informal apartheid-like conditons in Los Angeles "should be as intolerable as Jim Crow drinking fountains or segregated schools were in the 1960s" (Davis and Moctezuma 1999: Tercera Frontera section, para. 16). They even go so far as to call this "crabgrass apartheid" (ibid.). Perhaps they say it best when they argue that "The very existence of exclusionary borders, as all great radical thinkers have understood, constitutes a permanent crisis of human liberty" (ibid. para. 1).

Works Cited:  At the end of your essay or term paper you need to provide a list of works cited.  The entry includes the author(s), the date, the title of the article, the source of the article, the volume number the page numbers and if it is an electronic document the date it was retrived. Here is an example:

Davis, Mike, and Moctezuma Alessandra Moctezuma. 1999. Policing the third border. Colorlines, 2:7-12. Retrieved August 23, 2003, from http://www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/story2_3_08.html.

More detailed information about Parenthetical Citations and creating your list of Works Cited is available.

See the APA online guide for detailed nformation on citing electronic sources.

It is often the case that an organization is the author of a web site.  If so use the organization’s name as the author.  If the author cannot be determined then your source is not likely very credible! 

I'll accept some variation. The important thing is that you use a consistent style and cite your sources in a manner which allows your reader to refer back to them.