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See also  Weaving Quotes into Your Writing, Summarizing, Paraphrasing and Quoting,  Plagiarism vs. Documentation

In-text or in-project documentation is the newly recognized format for acknowledging borrowed information within your original text. No longer are footnotes used, unless you need to clarify or add some information. This type of documentation is necessary in both traditional paper and multimedia presentation.
Use in-text or in-project documentation to cite a source whenever you:

• use an original idea from one of your sources, whether you quote or paraphrase it
• summarize original ideas from one of your sources
• use factual information that is not common knowledge (Common knowledge is
• information that recurs in many sources. If you are not certain it is common knowledge,
• cite to be safe.)
• quote directly from a source
• use a date or fact that might be disputed

Usually only the author's last name and the page number OR, in the absence of an author, the title and the page number are given. Do not use the word "page" or any abbreviations. Page numbers may be omitted if the article is a one-page article or one in an encyclopedia arranged alphabetically. Page numbers are may also be omitted when citing Web resources, which do not normally include paging.

The purpose of this format is to give immediate source information without interrupting the flow of the paper. Usually parenthetical citations are placed at the end of a sentence, but they may be placed in the middle (see example 6). The academic world takes in-text documentation seriously. Inaccurate documentation is as serious as having no documentation at all.

Rules for Using In-Text Documentation

1. Use the author's last name and give the page number in parentheses. Do not use "page" or abbreviations for page, just write the number. In most cases you will be citing one or two pages, leading your reader to a specific piece of information. Allow one space before the parentheses but none after it if a period follows.

EX: Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native is the penultimate example of coincidence (Ellman 89).

2. If you are using more than one book by the same author, give the last name, comma, the title, and the page.

EX: Animal imagery conveys the primitive, uncontrolled rage that the peasants feel. One person "...had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth" (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 33-34).

3. If you identify the author and title in the text, just give the page number.

EX: In Jude the Obscure, Hardy depicts the heart-rending disappointment that Jude must face: "...the spires of the Medieval buildings haunted his existence and at the same time they beckoned him to call the pillars of learning his home" (9).

4. If there is no author, give the title and the page number.

EX: Some critics, including Christopher Ricks, feel that Thomas Hardy overuses trite coincidences to generate the action in his novels (Spectator 5).

5. If you are quoting a direct quotation from a secondary source, you must identify it as such.

EX: According to Derek Montana, "...the critic's worst enemy is himself" (qtd. in Paris 87).

6. If a quotation or information appears in the middle of your own idea, then insert the documentation immediately after the quotation.

EX: Derek Montana's idea, "...the critic's worst enemy is himself" (qtd. in Paris 87), parallels the idea that interpretation reveals one's own biases.

7. If the quoted material exceeds two lines in your text, you should either:

a) indent both margins of the quotation (and single space if possible on your word processor)

b) or indent both margins, single space, and use a smaller font.

8. Web documents generally do not have fixed page numbers or any kind of section numbering. If your source lacks numbering, omit numbers from your in-text documentation and use only the main entry, author, or title in parenthesis.

EX: A recent CNN.com review noted that the book's purpose was "to teach cultures that are both different from and similar to world status quo" (Allen).

If your source includes fixed page numbers or section numbering (such as numbering of paragraphs), cite the relevant numbers. Give the appropriate abbreviation before the numbers (Moulthrop, pars. 19-20). In this case "pars" is used for numbered paragraphs. For a Web document, the page numbers of a printout should NOT be cited, because the pagination may vary in different printouts.

Specific Examples


Corporate or Committee Authorship
It is best to include the name of the agency within the text.

EX: The Thomas Hardy Literary Society has called Hardy the "Victorian-modern father of literature" (34).

EX: Dvorak is nicknamed "Old Borax," but it is never mentioned by some critics (Hall 5: 87-88).

EX: Jude can be surveyed from a Biblical point of view as a "martyr" (New Yorker 16).

EX: In Julius Caesar perhaps the most quoted line comes from Caesar: "Et, tu, Brute!" (3:1:23).

EX: "When I was half the man I was/And serve me right as the preachers warn," ("Lament" 37-38).

For quotations longer than three lines, preserve the form and spacing of the original.

EX: "The Human Genome Initiative is a worldwide research effort that has the goal of analyzing the structure of human DNA and determining the location of the estimated 100,000 human genes ("National Human Genome Research Homepage").

Do not cite the page numbers of a printout. Pagination varies depending on fonts and printers.

EX: According to the New York Times, Jesse Jackson appears to have a very decent chance to win the Democratic nomination for President (Kehoe C4).

EX: Whale communication research started in the late 1950's by Stanford University graduate students who were studying mating calls (Davis 78).

If you are presenting through a PowerPoint or other multimedia program, include parenthetical notes in the text or as near as possible to the media item with full documentation in the closing slides.