Citation styles can be broadly divided into styles common to the humanities and the sciences, though there is considerable overlap. Some style guides, such as
the Chicago Manual of Style, are quite flexible and cover both parenthetical and note citation systems. Others, such as
MLA and
APA styles, specify formats within the context of a single citation system. These may be referred to as citation formats as well as citation styles. The various guides thus specify order of appearance, for example, of publication date, title, and page numbers following the author name, in addition to conventions of punctuation, use of italics, emphasis, parenthesis, quotation marks, etc., particular to their style. A number of organizations have created styles to fit their needs; consequently, a number of different guides exist. Individual publishers often have their own in-house variations as well, and some works are so long-established as to have their own citation methods too:
Stephanus pagination for
Plato;
Bekker numbers for
Aristotle; citing the Bible by book, chapter and verse; or
Shakespeare notation by play. The
Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies.
Humanities • The
Chicago style (CMOS) was developed and its guide is
The Chicago Manual of Style. It is most widely used in history and economics as well as some social sciences. The closely related
Turabian style—which derives from it—is for student references, and is distinguished from the CMOS by omission of quotation marks in reference lists, and mandatory access date citation. • The Columbia style was created by Janice R. Walker and Todd Taylor to give detailed guidelines for citing internet sources. Columbia style offers models for both the humanities and the sciences. •
Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace by Elizabeth Shown Mills covers primary sources not included in CMOS, such as censuses, court, land, government, business, and church records. Includes sources in electronic format. Used by genealogists and historians. •
Harvard referencing (or author-date system) is a specific kind of
parenthetical referencing. Parenthetical referencing is recommended by both the
British Standards Institution and the
Modern Language Association. Harvard referencing involves a short author-date reference, e.g., "(Smith, 2000)", being inserted after the cited text within parentheses and the full reference to the source being listed at the end of the article. •
MLA style was developed by the Modern Language Association and is most often used in
the arts and the
humanities, particularly in
English studies, other
literary studies, including
comparative literature and
literary criticism in languages other than English ("foreign languages"), and some interdisciplinary studies, such as
cultural studies,
drama and
theatre, film, and other
media, including television. This style of citations and bibliographical format uses parenthetical referencing with author-page (Smith 395) or author-[short] title-page (Smith,
Contingencies 42) in the case of more than one work by the same author within parentheses in the text, keyed to an alphabetical list of sources on a "works cited" page at the end of the paper, as well as notes (footnotes or endnotes). • The
MHRA Style Guide is published by the
Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) and most widely used in the arts and humanities in the United Kingdom, where the MHRA is based. It is available for sale both in the UK and in the United States. It is similar to MLA style, but has some differences. For example, MHRA style uses footnotes that reference a citation fully while also providing a bibliography. Some readers find it advantageous that the footnotes provide full citations, instead of shortened references, so that they do not need to consult the bibliography while reading for the rest of the publication details. In some areas of the humanities, footnotes are used exclusively for references, and their use for conventional
footnotes (explanations or examples) is avoided. In these areas, the term
footnote is actually used as a synonym for
reference, and care must be taken by editors and typesetters to ensure that they understand how the term is being used by their authors.
Law • The
Bluebook is a citation system traditionally used in American academic legal writing, and the Bluebook (or similar systems derived from it) are used by many courts. At present, academic legal articles are always footnoted, but motions submitted to courts and court opinions traditionally use inline citations, which are either separate sentences or separate clauses. Inline citations allow readers to quickly determine the strength of a source based on, for example, the court a case was decided in and the year it was decided. • The legal citation style used almost universally in Canada is based on the
Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (AKA
McGill Guide), published by
McGill Law Journal. • British legal citation almost universally follows the
Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA).
Sciences, mathematics, engineering, physiology, and medicine • The
American Chemical Society style, or
ACS style, is often used in chemistry and some of the
physical sciences. In ACS style references are numbered in the text and in the reference list, and numbers are repeated throughout the text as needed. • In the style of the
American Institute of Physics (
AIP style), references are also numbered in the text and in the reference list, with numbers repeated throughout the text as needed. • Styles developed for the
American Mathematical Society (AMS), or AMS styles, such as
AMS-LaTeX, are typically implemented using the
BibTeX tool in the
LaTeX typesetting environment. Brackets with the author's initials and year are inserted in the text and at the beginning of the reference. Typical citations are listed in line with alphabetic-label format, e.g. [AB90]. This type of style is also called an "authorship trigraph". • The
Vancouver system, recommended by the
Council of Science Editors (CSE), is used in medical and scientific papers and research. • In one major variant, that used by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), citation numbers are included in the text in square brackets rather than as superscripts. All bibliographical information is exclusively included in the list of references at the end of the document, next to the respective citation number. • The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) is reportedly the original kernel of this biomedical style, which evolved from the Vancouver 1978 editors' meeting. The
MEDLINE/
PubMed database uses this citation style and the
National Library of Medicine provides "ICMJE
Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals – Sample References". • The American Medical Association has its own variant of Vancouver style with only minor differences. See
AMA Manual of Style. • The style of the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), or
IEEE style, encloses citation numbers within square brackets and numbers them consecutively, with numbers repeated throughout the text as needed. • In areas of biology that falls within the
ICNafp (which itself uses this citation style throughout), a variant form of author-title citation is the primary method used when making nomenclatural citations and sometimes general citations (for example in code-related proposals published in
Taxon), with the works in question not cited in the bibliography unless also cited in the text. Titles use standardized abbreviations following
Botanico-Periodicum-Huntianum for periodicals and
Taxonomic Literature 2 (later
IPNI) for books. • Pechenik citation style is a style described in
A Short Guide to Writing about Biology, 6th ed. (2007), by
Jan A. Pechenik. • In 1955, Eugene Garfield proposed a
bibliographic system for scientific literature, to consolidate the integrity of
scientific publications.
Social sciences • The style of the
American Psychological Association, or
APA style, published in the
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, is most often used in
social sciences. APA citation style is similar to
Harvard referencing, listing the author's name and year of publication, although these can take two forms:
name citations in which the surnames of the authors appear in the text and the year of publication then appears in parentheses, and
author-date citations, in which the surnames of the authors and the year of publication all appear in parentheses. In both cases, in-text citations point to an alphabetical list of sources at the end of the paper in a "references" section. • The
American Political Science Association publishes both a style manual and a style guide for publications in this field. The style is close to the CMOS. • The
American Anthropological Association utilizes a modified form of the Chicago style laid out in their publishing style guide. • The
ASA style of the
American Sociological Association is one of the main styles used in
sociological publications. == Issues ==