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Citations and Notes
- Literature Review - Overview
- Part One - Literature Survey
- Literature Survey - Part Two
- Efficient Ways Of Searching The Literature
- Where to Hunt
- Other Useful Info
- Citations And Notes
- Errors Of Judgment
- Planning Checklist
Other acceptable variations of each of these forms can be found in the bibliographies
and lists of references in books and journals in your field of study.
Since you will need information about the style used for kinds of publications
other than books and journal articles (such as unpublished dissertations, newspaper
articles, conference proceedings, and personal communications), you will find
it helpful to consult such sources as the APA and Chicago manuals.
When you select a style, it is important (a) that it be acceptable to the
members of the faculty committee that supervise your project and (b) that you
consistently stick to that same style throughout your work. In some universities,
the rules governing the form of theses and dissertations are available in a
booklet or style sheet available in the central library, in your own department,
in the campus bookstore, or in the graduate school office. If your institution
has such a publication, you can benefit from obtaining a copy at an early stage
of your project.
Citations and notes: Throughout the final version
of your study, you are obligated to identify the literature resources from which
you have drawn quotations and key concepts. There are several common ways of
citing such references. One way that has increased in popularity over recent
decades is to note the name of the author and the year of publication in parentheses.
Then readers can find the exact title and publisher of the book or article in
the list of references at the end of your document. That’s the system we use
throughout this book.
An alternative approach involves a superscript - a small number raised above
the line, like this 1 - which guides readers to the cited source at the bottom
of the page. Sometimes the source that is signaled by a superscript is not displayed
at the bottom on the page but, rather, it is located in a numbered bibliographic
list at the end of the current chapter or at the end of the entire document.
You may occasionally wish to add an explanatory note to a segment of your presentation,
but you don’t want to interrupt the flow of thought of the present paragraph.
There are several options for adding informative material. One is to place the
added comments in parentheses within the body of the writing. (Such a note then
looks like this, which does, indeed, interrupt the flow, but the parentheses
show the reader that the inserted comment is simply an aside.) Another popular
practice is to cast the addition as a footnote at the bottom of the page, signaled
by a superscript. Or else the insertion can be an end-note in a listing of such
notes at the close of the chapter or at the end of the thesis or dissertation.
These options and others are illustrated in such resources as the Chicago Manual
of Style ( 1993).Coding material from the literature: The word coding is used
here to mean attaching code numbers or letters to each passage or set of notes
that you take from the professional literature. The code indicates what function
you intend the passage or notes to perform in your project. We are thus suggesting
that you should not take any material from the literature (quotations, concepts,
theories, appraisals) unless you can estimate where in your work that material
will likely be used. We believe it’s a waste of time to lift passages from a
book or journal simply because such material "might be useful someplace
or other."Once you have selected the topic or research problem on which
your project will focus, you should be able to predict, at least in a general
way, the kind of content and pattern of organization that your thesis or dissertation
will assume. To make such a prediction requires that you (a) envision the kinds
of questions your project will answer for readers and (b) estimate the sequence
of chapters or sections into which your entire document will be divided. One
way to accomplish this task is first to list the questions you hope to answer
for the reading audience.
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