ELECTRONIC HIGHWAYS
Sites for Citing

Numerous guides-both online and in print-have tried to answer these questions by suggesting formats for citing electronic resources. The most useful have been grouped together at a meta-site called Citing Electronic Resources (http://www.ipl.org/classroom/userdocs/internet/citing.html), which is part of the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/), a wonderful research resource in its own right.

You can link to the Citing Web site through BISON II (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/) by clicking on "Online Resources" and then on "Citing Electronic Resources" near the top of the page. Here you will find links to a dozen citation guides on the Internet as well as a list of half-a-dozen books that include sections on referencing electronic information. The Web-based guides at the site, some of which are patterned on classic standbys such as the APA and the MLA style manuals (see below), can be accessed by clicking on their titles. Others have been compiled with specific disciplines in mind (for example, Melvin E. Page's "A Brief Citation Guide for Internet Resources in History and the Humanities"), but most of them can be adapted to suit almost any subject.

Although not on the Internet, the latest editions of classic reference works such as the Chicago Manual of Style, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, and Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association have been updated to include electronic citation examples. There are also several books devoted exclusively to making recommendations for citing electronic resources. Electronic Style: A Guide to Citing Electronic Information, by Xia Li and Nancy Crane, is one of the most popular because it provides more examples of different electronic information sources than the others. An abbreviated version of Li and Crane's book is entitled "Bibliographic Formats for Citing Electronic Information." It isn't included in the meta-site listing, but it's worth a look at http://www.uvm.edu/~ncrane/estyles/.

Most of the books referred to at the Citing Electronic Resources Web site are available in one or more of the University Libraries reference collections. The online guides can be accessed from BISON II terminals in the Libraries or other computers that can link to the Internet. Unless you've been asked to use a specific format for your references, any of them will serve most cases by establishing a format for bibliographic consistency.

For help with connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

­ Will Hepfer and Nancy Schiller, University Libraries