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HIST 258 - Environmental History / Kiser, April


Subjects: History

Cite your sources or else...

Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Fates of Illustrious Men and Women

Giovanni Boccaccio. The Fates of Illustrious Men and Women. Written 1355-74. Illuminated about 1413-15.

Chicago Style Guides Online

Chicago Manual of Style in Print

About Citations

There are several reasons why we cite our sources:

  • Giving credit to researches and acknowledging their ideas is ethical behavior.
  • Showing your reader that you've done your research. Be proud!
  • Making it easy for readers to track down your sources if they want to consult them.
  • Avoiding plagiarism.

 

To cite a source you will create a short reference, which you will ultimately list on your bibliography. References are made up of common elements that provide your readers with the information that they need to track down sources. The most common elements are:

  • author name(s)
  • titles of books, articles, journals, and websites
  • editor(s)
  • volume and issue numbers (for articles)
  • date of publication
  • page numbers

 

This is an example of how a reference to a secondary source might look in the Chicago style:

Snow, Dean. "Sexual Dimorphism in European Upper Paleolithic Cave Art." American Antiquity 78, no. 4 (2013): 746-61.

 

This is an example of how a reference to a primary source in print might look in the Chicago style:

Weiner, Lawrence. "And Then Unintended As," 1972. In Artists Talk, ed. Peggy Gale. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2004.