User:Rockpocket/Citing

{{WP help pages (header bar)}}

{{PageTabs

|NOTOC = true

|Introduction

|What is Wikipedia?

|Registering an account

|Editing

|Formatting

|Links

|Citing

|Discussion

|This={{{This|7}}}

}}

Why cite?

  • If you add information to an article, be sure to include your references.

:::* This is important because unreferenced facts are subject to removal.

  • What references should you use?

:::* Published, reliable, independent sources that are trustworthy and authoritative.

:::* For science: make sure they are peer reviewed and use secondary sources (reviews) over primary sources as much as possible.

:::* Do not use other Wikipedia articles as sources.

  • It is best to use inline citations so that other editors and readers can verify the information you add.

Adding inline citations

The easiest way to create an inline citation is using footnotes. You can create footnotes with Wiki markup (or using the console) by adding:

  • YOUR SOURCE ref tags around your source and, if not there already,
  • {{Reflist}} under the heading ==References== near the bottom of the page.

The ref tags will convert your source into a footnote reference (like this oneYOUR SOURCE).

{{reflist}}

  • If you wish to refer to the same reference again you can simply add:

Formatting sources

If your source is a website, you should create an external link to the website address.

To create an external link to your source, put the website address (URL) in square brackets. It is a good idea to provide a short description just after the external site address. This description will be displayed in the reference list as the title of the external site, rather than the actual URL of the site.

  • [http://www.google.com Google search engine]

For other types of references there are special Citation templates:

  • For books: {{Cite book

| last =

| first =

| coauthors =

| title =

| publisher =

| date =

| pages =

| url =

| doi =

| id =

| isbn = }}

  • For Newspaper articles: {{Cite news

| last =

| first =

| coauthors =

| title =

| newspaper =

| pages =

| date =

| url =

| accessdate = }}

  • For Journal articles, the PubMed ID or DOI are usually enough - the missing metadata will then be fetched automatically: {{cite pmid|12615090}}

or

{{cite doi|10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124}}

  • Journal article citations can also be generated quickly by adding the PubMed ID to either [http://diberri.crabdance.com/cgi-bin/templatefiller/index.cgi? web page] or [http://sumsearch.org/cite/ this one].