Ok, so I’m reading through student papers. I was quite insistent on classic endnotes or footnotes in MLA or Turabian, and quite emphatically asked them NOT to use parenthetical citation, etc. Wrote it down, gave them a stylesheet, provided examples, etc.
But I have several papers with something very odd-- it this taught somewhere? A mock up example (imagine the numbers as superscript):
In the year 1784 some guy did something with a thing. (1) This was caused, according to one author, by mutant toad licking skillet inkwell banana chuds. (2) At the other side of the country a Balrog hopped up on quaaludes fenced the royal jewelry for a toaster. (1) “This was the beginning of the end for the Cowboys.” (5) Five other examples of such coffee-mug necromantic bathtubs provide the same evidence. (1)
Then at the end of the paper instead of notes and a bibliography is a bib lined up with numbers, which these ‘note references’ respond to (of course the page number never gets involved)-- every citation reference marked with “1” throughout the paper corresponds to source #1 on the list.
Is someone teaching this? Is this a dumbed-down version of citation being taught in high schools or something? Is this common? In the last couple of years I’ve seen this several times. It’s like someone explained endnotes to them in a foreign language in a dream and they didn’t quite get the concept. How do you get to 3d or 4th year in University having no idea how a footnote functions? I’m hoping there’s a reasonable explanation. . .
It’s out there somewhere. I’ve had a couple of high school AP students do that with their research papers, even though I insist on APA standards. Weird.
I have no idea what the ‘right’ method would be, but this seems like it works just fine. I know that you are English teachers, but in the world of business the focus is getting the idea across clearly and concisely. If drawing circles and arrows and including a clay scupture best gets the point across, then do it by golly.
PR-- that’s interesting. You’re right. And Cher3-- yes, so JAMA does do that. . . how odd. How does one account for page numbers? Is this common in pre-med and bio sciences, I wonder?
I’m a bit confused - is this for references, and not notes?
References as superscripts is IEEE style. many conferences use square brackets instead. Multple references to the same paper in the text use the same number, and the numbers are in order of reference. (Though in conferences alphabetical order is also okay.)
I see it regularly in a variety of journal articles, and I study Biology. Page numbers for the article are simply included in the bibliographic information at the end. This isn’t the most common style, but it’s not uncommon. Of course, we rarely use books, so page numbers within the in-text citations simply isn’t something to worry about. If I were to cite a full book within a paper, I’m not sure how I’d include that information, but probably in the bibliographic information at the end. If I were to get to the point of writing a book myself, I’d use footnotes most likely. Well, after I asked myself, “How did I get here? This is not my beautiful wife…”
Yeah, this is the standard citation scheme for ACM conferences, too. We don’t put in page numbers, but that’s because we’re usually citing conference papers (which are short, and clearly about a single subject) rather than books.
This is how things are cited in technical papers as far as I know. For example:
The permeable cations and anions are unevenly
distributed intra- and extravascularly, according to the
Donnan theory (1), with the larger total molality
(mmol/kg of water) on the vascular side. The contribution
of the Donnan effect to the colloid osmotic pressure
(lTcoIloid) is proportional to the squared molality of impermeable
charge and inversely proportional to the
molality of salt:
lTcolloid = R - T #{216}[mbumin+ Znet2/(4mit)] - pHo (1)
where R is the gas constant, T is the temperature, 4)is
the osmotic coefficient, m is molality, Znet is the molality
of impermeable albumin net charge, and pH20 is the
density of water.
The net charge of albumin is defined as its own charge
plus the charge of all bound ions, all of which depend on
pH (2).
With (1) and (2) referencing other papers in the bibliography.
I learn something new everyday! Ok, I’ll be clearer in the future if I know I have a lot of science students in the course-- I guess I thought the hard sciences used parenthetical citations like the sof. . . ahem, like sociology and pysch and such. Ignorance (mine) fought once again.
This is a very typical scientific citation styles. Many scientific journals use this style. I have trouble getting my science students to use it, even when I request it of them in their scietific research projects. They insist in using APA!
My handy copy of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (sixth edition)–thank you, third-year Romantic literature prof–cites the APA style in footnote notation. The number style is like you mentioned, but it usually goes, for example:
Egghead contends in his paper that Shakespeare was high on marijuana when he wrote Hamlet (3, pg. 45) but Dr. I. Tower refutes this notion in his work To Puff or Not To Puff (4, pg. 128) and writes that no drunken encounter happened between Shakespeare and his contemporary Marlowe (5, vol. 6, pg. 21).
Works Cited
Egghead, P. Is this a joint I see before me? Shakespeare and Drug Use. Ankh-Morpork: Unseen University, 1986.
Tower, I. To Puff or Not To Puff. Westchester, NY: Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, 1963.
And so on.
This is the format that a lot of non-fiction books use, too. Just on my nearest bookshelf alone I can find a couple of books that uses it: Our Dreaming Mind by Robert Van De Castle & The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease. The dream one is a really really soft science, but not the other.
The American Chemical Society allows three different ways of citing in an ACS publication, depending on the publication. A superscript number, a number in italics and enclosed in parentheses, or by author name and publication year in parentheses. The papers I read most often (J. Org. Chem., J. Amer. Chem. Soc, and Org. Lett.) use the first system. The references are either in footnotes on the bottom of the page or as endnotes. References to other papers include the journal abbreviation, year, volume, issue, and pagination. References to monographs are generally just to the entire work. I generally will cite ACS style unless told otherwise in any chemical writing that I do.
