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And as I always find when I meet creationists or non-evolutionists or critics or whatever, I find it a lot easier to hate them in print than I do in person. And in fact I found -- I must confess -- I found Phillip Johnson to be a very congenial person, with a fund of very funny stories about Supreme Court justices, some of which may even be true, unlike his scientific claims.
- Dr. Michael Ruse

Remember when you were in school and you thought to yourself...

"Why am I learning this? I am never going to use this in real life!"

One of the first classes I dropped in school was French. The very first place I went when I left school was France. I guess we all prefer to learn the hard way. When i started editing the odd page on Wikipedia, I noticed right away they had an odd way of citing sources, it is mainly due to the template format they use, and is somewhat portable across different subjects, so I won't knock them down for it.

However, when writing reports of a scientific nature, there are standards one expects to see in the layout of the paper. Citation markups differ depending on the source. It has been claimed that there is no true method or standard for citing references in a paper. I disagree. They all follow the following, perhaps unwritten, rules:

1.They provide the reader the information needed to look up the original source of the citation.
2.The original information can be found by anyone. It is a public record, or some kind of published work.
3.It is relative to either the claim, or the body of the report.
4.It is indexed in some manner at the back of the paper.

As for indexing, there seems to be three ways to organize the data. The first way is to list the citations in the order they appear in the paper. I tend to prefer this method as it allows me to cite while I write, rather then searching the entire work when I am finished hoping not to forget any. By the way, the official name for this is a "Citation Order System".

The second popular way to cite works is a alphabet/numbering system, this is used for large papers it seems, as it allows the writer to repeat citation codes, and organize the records according to type in the bibliography. The alphabet is used to group types of citations such as electronic sources, books, magazines, and other published works.

The Harvard System is going out of style, commonly referred to the name and number system. To be honest, it's annoying. Publishers tend to not accept works with this system as it also increases costs, readers find it as equally annoying as the researchers. It has one advantage in that you only need to include the reference material once, and you can edit rather easy by hand. But who doesn't use a word processor these days anyway.

As for the actual format of the citation...

Many works have covered the style and format of an actual citation, with one exception, which seems odd in the present day. Online sources, because they can be unreliable, they tend to vanish into thin air literally, and are not well covered.

It is however a disadvantage not to include such information in a report. Even when Gopher searchers were still common for old timers like myself, I still included them when I felt it was important to do so.

When citing electronic formats, the first thing you are going to look for is the author of the work. This is mainly due to the fact that if the location of the source changes in the future, it is assumed that the author will be the first piece of data indexed. The author of a work can be an organization, a person , a group of people, or even an editor. Authors should be the first item listed in a citation record. We need to pat each other on the back. ;)

At the beginning of this post I have a quote from Dr. Micheal Ruse from his speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I am going to use this quote to format a citation record as an example.

1 - Prof. Michael Ruse, (1993) "The New Antievolutionism"
Access Research Network [ONLINE] Available: Origins Research Archives www.arn.org [Saturday, February 13, 1993] Speech Transcript

There is enough information within the citation to fulfill the requirements of the rules. The "1" in this case just represents the personal preference I have to ordered citation. The date is a bit of an issue with some writers. Some prefer to include the data only once, giving either the just the year, or the complete date. It is generally accepted that the date should follow the author of the work, but as to whether or not it should include the full date is up for grabs. In my example I do both in order to fulfill the rules, you need to know the exact date when ever you can for on line sources, there can be thousands of records to search through even when using Nexus, or some other search engine. And the rules states, anyone should be able to find the source.

I know what your thinking.

Copying and pasting the entire citation into a google search will not get you to where you want to go. However, even google can help you get there. You know for example, the page you are looking for is on the arn.org server. And the title of the work, which should always follow the date, is "The New Antievolutionism". You can even include the type of document it is in an advance google search. (Hint: It's the only hit if you do it right)

Always more to learn.

wolfe

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Sunday, 11 March 2007
And as I always find when I meet creationists or non-evolutionists or critics or whatever, I find it a lot easier to hate them in print than I do...

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."