An Assorted Guide to Reference and Citation Formats
There are several referencing styles when it comes to writing research papers. The way in which references need to be cited, the style that they need to adhere to and the type of reference sources allowed are dictated by the publisher of the research paper, i.e. the conference or the journal. Now let us take a look at some of the well-known referencing styles used frequently across papers.
- MLA
- APA
- Chicago
- Harvard
- BibTex
The choice of reference style basically depends on the field of research work. The preceding sections will elucidate each and every referencing style in detail.
MLA
The Modern Language Association (MLA) is a common reference style used by works related to the field of humanities. Specifically speaking, the area of language and literature touches upon this style. Citing references in MLA format utilizes a parenthetical format with only the required information that could aid a reader in identifying the cited source. These citations need to be provided at the end of the sentence where the reference is referred to in the text.
The MLA format permits the citation of electronic and online resources in a format similar to print-based resources. In addition to these, the MLA format strictly dictates the arrangement of references in alphabetical order under the reference list.
The following represents a text abstract taken from [1].
Citation:
Previous linguistic space studies, by authors like Gruber (1965), Fillmore (1968), Leech (1969), Bennett (1975), and indeed, myself (Talmy, 1972, 1975), have laid a groundwork by isolating many of the basic geometric and dimensional distinctions that languages mark, and by recognizing the patterns that these form. The present study, however, aims beyond the pure description of spatial categories to an account of their common fundamental character and place within larger linguistic-cognitive systems.
Reference:
Bennett, D. Spatial and temporal uses of English prepositions; An essay in stratification semantics. New York: Longman Press, 1975.
Fillmore, C. The case for case. In E. Bach & R. Harms (Eds.), Universals in linguistic theory. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968.
Gruber, J. Studies in lexical relations. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1965.
Hill, C. Variation in the use of ‘front’ and ‘back’ in bilingual speakers. Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California. 1975.
Langacker, R. Grammar as an image. In: Linguistic notes from La Jolla 6. San Diego, CA: University of California, 1979.
Leech, G. Towards a semantic description of English. New York: Longman Press, 1969.
Talmy, L. Semantic structures in English and Atsugewi. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California at Berkeley, 1972.
Talmy, L. Semantics and syntax of motion. In J. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 4. New York: Academic Press, 1975.
APA
The American Psychological Association (APA) is a referencing style that is applied within research pertaining to Education, Psychology, and Sciences and is also the most general format of referencing style used often across papers.
When citing a reference in APA style, the citation must mandatorily include 2 details.
- The author’s last name
- The year of publication
These details must adhere to the details presented in its respective reference under the reference list. A sample citation and its respective references are provided here below [2].
Citation:
This paradox is explained by the fact that classification estimation is only a function of the sign (in binary cases) of the function estimation; the function approximation can still be poor while classification accuracy remains high (Friedman 1997; Domingos and Pazzani 1997).
Reference:
Domingos, P., & Pazzani, M. (1997). On the optimality of the simple Bayesian classifier under zero-one loss. Machine learning, 29(2–3), 103–130.
Friedman, N., Geiger, D., & Goldszmidt, M. (1997). Bayesian network classifiers. Machine learning, 29(2–3), 131–163.
Chicago
These types of references address the field of business, history and fine arts. It is also synonymous with the Turabian referencing style. This uses footnotes or endnotes to refer to resources using a superscript number that is displayed at the end of the text that is being referred to from an external reference.
With the citations in the other formats that we have discussed thus far, the order of citing did not matter though there were stipulations regarding the reference list items’ alphabetic order. However, here, with the Chicago style, the citations need to be presented in serial order where their citation numbers (superscript digits) read sequentially.
The following excerpt is taken from [3].
Citation:
Some of the subjects that Smith would have studied and been examined on for the BA and MA degrees include humanity (“the most interesting works of the best Latin writers”), Greek, logic, moral philosophy, mathematics, natural philosophy, practical astronomy, and natural history.50 The medical requirements were: anatomy, chemistry, institutions of medicine, the practice of medicine, materia medica, midwifery, surgery, botany, and an infirmary clerkship for 12 months, which probably would have been in the Royal Infirmary, with a capacity of 208 patients.50 A two-hour oral “acquittal” before the faculty would be required in order to graduate, and Smith did so with honors.
Upon graduation, Smith ventured to Paris for additional clinical exposure before returning home to New York. After Smith was denied passage54 by Captain Bigley, of the ship Canonicus, his anti-slavery colleagues John Murray and William Smeal in Glasgow rallied to his public defense,55 and wrote Smith a heartfelt letter of consolation.56
Reference:
50. University of Glasgow., Hay JB. Inaugural addresses by Lords Rectors of the University of Glasgow to which are prefixed an historical sketch and account of the present state of the University. Glasgow: David Robertson; 1839.
51. Goodall AL. The history of Glasgow medicine. <n.p.,; 1959.
52. Comrie JD. History of Scottish medicine to 1860. London,: Bailliere Tindall & Cox; 1927.
53. Smith JM. On the influence of opium upon the catamenial functions. New York Journal of Medicine 1844;2:57–58.
54. American slavery and its effects. The ship Canonicus, Captain bigley. Colored American February 17, 1838.
55. Murray J. To Captain Bigley, of the Brig Canonicus. Colored American February 17, 1838.
56. Smeal W. Letter to James McCune Smith from John Murray and William Smeal. In: Mitchell Library, Glasgow University. Glasgow, Scotland.
Harvard
The Harvard style is an equally popular format of referencing resources using the author-date format. Mostly it is written with the author’s last name followed by the year of publication of the resource. In cases where the text being referred to can be located within a particular range of pages, the page numbers will also accompany the citation in the text. If a resource lacks specific author detail, the citation will simply use the title of the resource and its year of publication.
The reference list adheres to an alphabetic ordering format where the last name of the first author’s is considered in arranging the references alphabetically. The following indicates a piece of text that uses the Harvard reference format [4].
Citation:
Citing references is essential in academia. It gives credit where it is due, adds authority to a statement and shows that a writer is not just giving his/her views but also including those of other writers. It also illustrates a point or offers support for an argument a writer wants to make and enables readers of work to find the source material (Damarell et al. , 2005). References need to be cited where documents are referred to in the text or work. Accuracy and consistency are essential to enable readers to identify and locate the materials referred to (Flinders University, 2002).
Reference:
Damarell, R., Badcock, J. and Miller, R. (2005). Author-date (Harvard) referencing guide, 3rd ed. Adelaide: Flinders University, School of Nursing and Midwifery.
BibTex
BibTex is a file and reference format that is often associated with latex documents. It can be used to list bibliography resources such as books, dissertations, articles, and so on. These BibTeX references are typically placed in a separate file that ends with a .bib file extension. This includes latex-specific formatting that will be rendered in the final version of the research work or article. A sample of a BibTeX citation is indicated below [5].
Citation:
There has been extensive research with regard to data completion in knowledge graph whereas the removal of erroneous data is still an area with on-going research prospects. Previous work by Lin et al. \cite{lin} has discussed about handling knowledge graph completion by learning entities and relation embeddings. This was set as an extension of the TransE \cite{bordes} and TransH \cite{wang} models that compute entity and relational embeddings as a translation from one entity to the other in a relationship.
Reference:
@inproceedings{lin,
title={Learning entity and relation embeddings for knowledge graph completion.},
author={Lin, Yankai and Liu, Zhiyuan and Sun, Maosong and Liu, Yang and Zhu, Xuan},
booktitle={AAAI},
volume={15},
pages={2181–2187},
year={2015}
}
@inproceedings{bordes,
title={Translating embeddings for modeling multi-relational data},
author={Bordes, Antoine and Usunier, Nicolas and Garcia-Duran, Alberto and Weston, Jason and Yakhnenko, Oksana},
booktitle={Advances in neural information processing systems},
pages={2787–2795},
year={2013}
}
@inproceedings{wang,
title={Knowledge Graph Embedding by Translating on Hyperplanes.},
author={Wang, Zhen and Zhang, Jianwen and Feng, Jianlin and Chen, Zheng},
booktitle={AAAI},
volume={14},
pages={1112–1119},
year={2014}
}
These are some of the most commonly used reference formats that need to be used according to the type of publication, the field of research, paper format, etc.
Reference
[1] Talmy, L. (1983). How language structures space. In Spatial orientation (pp. 225–282). Springer, Boston, MA.
[2] McCallum, A., & Nigam, K. (1998, July). A comparison of event models for naive Bayes text classification. In AAAI-98 workshop on learning for text categorization (Vol. 752, №1, pp. 41–48).
[3] Morgan, T. M. (2003). The education and medical practice of Dr. James McCune Smith (1813–1865), first black American to hold a medical degree. Journal of the National Medical Association, 95(7), 603.
[4] Lamptey, R. B., & Atta-Obeng, H. (2012). Challenges with Reference Citations Among Postgraduate Students at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. Journal of Science and Technology (Ghana), 32(3), 69–80.
[5] Manuela Jeyaraj, Srinath Perera, Malith Jayasinghe, and Nadheesh Jihan. 2019. Probabilistic Error Detection Model for Knowledge Graph Refinement, In Twentieth International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. preprint:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332173091_Probabilistic_Error_Detection_Model_for_Knowledge_Graph_Refinement.
