Citations Citations

So there are many ways to credit people within documents or at the end of documents and yes its important, but how important is it? When it comes down to it in this day and age; how much citation is relevant?

Take the old citation methods the people relied on for years such as MLA and APA which can be found at the owl at perdue. Did you see what happened there, enough information was given so that you could find the information you are looking for without much hassle. All this is required is that you use any search engine to type in the name of the article and you can find it easily. example: Click me

Now that brought you exactly to the website and the article that was in question. Which brings us back to the previous question that ask how important is it to use full citations that MLA ask for. There for it is proposed that new guidelines be drawn for further citations. These new citations should be minimal meaning that if all you need is the title of the article and the authors name and for the majority of the cases this is all you ever need to find any article online whether its a book thats in print, a video, or web-article (such as a blog).

Though these guidelines are not perfect due to changes that may occur in older printed writings and some web-sources. More specifically it wont help you with any article in question that doesn't have a title or author and thus a direct link my be in-order or at the very least a link to the main website with directions to find the article in question.

All in all the old MLA and APA styles are antiquated, but there aren't great substitutions so the dilemma becomes this: you choose. Yes thats right. You choose how to site it and make educated assumptions on how to site something and make sure some one else can find it easily and with out hassle.