Citations

Citations are used to attribute information in your writing to the sources you used. Citing your sources is an important part of being an ethical member of the information community. In addition to demonstrating your academic integrity, citation serves a number of other functions:

• gives credit to the individuals and institutions whose work you used, contributing to their success
• helps your reader find additional information and do their own research
• makes the distinction between your source material and your own contribution clearer, so that your ideas can have more impact
• allows you to build on the authority and findings of previous work

“Citation styles” are conventions for how this information is communicated and formatted. Students may encounter citation styles primarily as one part of an assignment description, and instructors will vary in their preferences and particularity about citation style. But most of the major citation styles were developed by publishers or professional organizations as guidelines for authors and editors to ensure consistency within and across publications in their field. Publishers may have very specific in-house styles for authors to follow. For that reason, learning to follow a style guide is more important than memorizing the conventions of a specific style. Other pages in this book will cover key details of some major styles and what elements to look out for when following a style guide.

Reasons for Citation Styles

American students in music will likely encounter 3 or 4 of the most common citation styles during their college and graduate careers, depending on the class and instructor preferences. These differences can seem arbitrary and frustrating, but they reflect the fact that music as a field is actually made up of several sub-disciplines with different ways of approaching research and writing. For example, musicology tends to approach these areas in ways very similar to humanities fields like history, while ethnomusicology shares approaches with anthropology. Fields like music education, music business, and music therapy share methods and writing styles with their corresponding non-music fields. So music students may work in styles aligned with humanities, social sciences, or science and medicine fields. Each of these research approaches has different needs of their citation styles, especially for how they format “in-text” citations and fit them into the author’s writing. They have different rhetorical approaches to using source material, and that difference is reflected in their preferred formatting.

MLA (Modern Languages Association) style is often the first style American students learn, in high school English courses. “Author-Page” styles like MLA are best for studies that are likely to cite a more limited number of items many times, with attention to specific details of language or analysis, such as literature and some arts fields. The same book can be cited again and again, with different page numbers to call out different bits of textual evidence.

The Chicago Manual of Style offers two options, but the most common is the “Notes-Bibliography” Style. The style called “Turabian” is a version of the Chicago style that was adapted for students, and is very similar. These “Notes-Bibliography” styles work well for disciplines that tend to cite many different sources of different types, and that find value in substantial footnotes as a location for additional information, such as history. These styles use a footnote or endnote with a superscript number, which corresponds to a complete citation either at the bottom of the page or at the end of the article. The note format allows the writing and analysis to continue uninterrupted, while the reader can easily access full citations as needed. Since scholars like historians and musicologists are often synthesizing information from a variety of primary and secondary sources, this format allows easy access to the details of source type, citation of multiple sources in one note, and even commentary on the sources and their use.

APA (American Psychological Association) style uses an “Author-Date” format that is a good fit for fields where the date of publication is especially importance, like social science, science, and medical fields. These fields also tend to cite a study’s overall conclusions rather than specific phrases or bits of information, so exact page number is less useful. And they may cite many studies by the same author, so the date also helps to quickly differentiate between works by the same authors. The Chicago Manual also offers an Author-Date option, for social sciences publications published by their press. APA style is often used by writers in music education and ethnomusicology.

As you’ll see when exploring a style in more detail, the full list of sources that follow the document is usually formatted to make following up on an in-text citation easier. Rather than memorizing all these styles, it’s best to simply pay attention to what style is requested by your professor, editor, or publisher, and learn to follow the many examples and instructions available to construct proper citations. Consistency throughout a document will help you to communicate with your audience without missing or confusing details getting in the way.

Using Citation Generators and Managers

There are many automatic citation generators and citation management programs available online, including citation generating buttons on library websites and databases. It’s always best to check with your instructor to make sure they don’t have any policies against using these. In most cases, tools like this are a useful starting point for quickly saving most of the information needed in your bibliography, and getting it in roughly the right order. But be aware that they can often make mistakes, especially with less common source types like scores and recordings, and they aren’t equipped to tell you where and how to integrate in-text citations, so it’s still important to have an understanding of your preferred style.

Note on Citing Sources in Other Research Communities

When you are producing information for a research community outside of academia, there may be less formal guidance on how to credit your sources. However, it is still important to participate in the community ethically by following community norms for sharing sources and influences. As you encounter information in your community, via magazines, videos, podcasts, program notes, lectures, or any other format, make note of how participants you admire find ways to indicate how they are interacting with others who’ve shared information before.