POWER TO THE LITTLE ONES!!!_Part II_On citations.

What follows is Part II of an email I sent on 15th November 2020 to the youngest of my cousins, Riccardo. He had just started his first year of university after graduating through the pandemic, we had lost our legendary grandpa Nonno Alfredo just few months prior, and the family would not be reunited for the next two years. So, an email was my best available means to pass on my tradition of giving The Talk to “the little ones”, as they ventured to university as future first generation graduates. This part is also dedicated to another former “little one” among the recipients of this email, my architect cousin Arianna. She would be happy if you could follow and show some love to the urban regeneration adventure – or “urban acupuncture” – she is taking part in @needlecrowd – mention does not equate absolute endorsement.

[… continues from Part I … ] I found a very short article (6 pages) with very good pictures. I use it to show you a Google Scholar function you can use: citations.

If you type the title of this article on Google Scholar, the article doesn’t come out per se because it is not an academic article – meaning published by an academic journal after a peer review done by other scholars – but since it has been cited once somewhere it comes out as “[citation]” [in black].

So you can – and this is valid for any article, book or material on Google Scholar – click on the “Cite” button with quotes that you see below the article’s title, next to the little star accompanying the “Save” button. This way you can see all the details you have to include in your citation to avoid committing plagiarism.

ATTENTION! A window will pop up, showing official citation styles: MLA (devised by the Modern Language Association), APA (by the American Psychological Association), Chicago (as in University of Chicago), Harvard (it goes without saying), Vancouver (guess?). And how do we choose? 

First, by subject: in sociology or philosophy APA, Chicago e Harvard, are more frequently used. But it depends on who is the recipient of what you write, some professors have their own favorite. In architecture, too … But given the complication of having to cite architectural works, projects and drawings, I’ve found a quite complete guide on how to do just that. [the original link of this email is now behind a membership-only curtain – thanks Virginia Tech, you kinda suck! So here’s one for images, and another framework of reference that can be valid for buildings, design objects, and art pieces]

Second: I use Chicago because other styles in which the author’s name is reduced to a punctuated initial are more subjected to confusion, and can be discriminatory for authors whose surname is very common. This is particularly the case for surnames from areas of the world in which languages are not written in Latin letters, and surnames are numerically fewer than in other languages (see for example, China). 

If you cite material that you found on a website, other than all information [like author, title, webpage name, date of publication and URL] you should also add “Accessed on: …” and adding the date of your last access.

If, instead, you find an academic article on Google Scholar that has been cited already more than once and can be downloaded – click on the link to the title’s right to download, if it’s not accessible from your institution let me know 😉 – the title will be in blue and with no “[citation]” before the title. In this case, to the right of the quotes icon ” you’ll find “Cited by” and the amount of citations that article has received. Clicking on “Cited by” you’ll get to a chronological list of all the publications the article has been cited by, so they can be on the same topic but more updated because they’ve been published more recently. [ … continues …]

Go to Part I | This is Part II