I've had a few questions about citation style for the NSO project. I won't be grading based on whether your references follow the University of Chicago Style Manual. The purpose of the Literature Cited section is to make it easy to tell what sources you have depended on. As long as I can tell that easily, that's a. All I care about.
Having said that, referring several people have asked specifically about how to refer to the draft recovery plan and the critiques. Just so it's easy for me to keep things straight, I suggest the following format.1
USFWS. 2007a. Species profile: northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina). http://ecos.fws.gov/speciesProfile/SpeciesReport.do?spcode=B08B2
USFWS. 2007b. Draft recovery plan for the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina). Portland, OR.
Reviewer #1. 2007. SCB/AOU anonymous review.
Reviewer #2. 2007. SCB/AOU anonymous review.
Reviewer #3. 2007. SCB/AOU anonymous review.
Reviewer #4. 2007. SCB/AOU anonymous review.
Dugger, K. 2007. Review of draft NSO recovery plan.
Franklin, A. 2007. Review of draft NSO recovery plan.
Olson, G. 2007. Review of draft NSO recovery plan.
Remember: Just because I'm listing all of these references here doesn't mean you need to include all of them in your report. In fact, even though I hope you read them all, your project will probably be stronger if you focus on only one item on which the recovery plan is either especially strong or especially weak and refer only to those documents above and other relevant literature that are directly pertinent to the focus of your critique.
1If you've already used a different format, don't worry about it. Just make sure it will be clear what you're referring to.
2Use a similar format if you refer to other web resources. Leave the “a” and “b” off if you don't refer to the species profile page.
Posted by Kent at September 30, 2007 11:10 AM | TrackBack