How to cite

After the publication of the manual Methodology of Bibliographic References Creation, which I wrote in collaboration with my colleagues from the University Campus Library at MU and the Central Library at the Faculty of Science at MU, I kept getting further questions covering areas that were not covered in that reference work. I therefore decided to prepare a follow-up publication that could explain methods of citing in more detail.

The following text was created primarily for the purpose of the e-learning course vsiv021 Information Literacy, which I teach at the Faculty of Medicine at MU. Nevertheless, even though all of the samples are associated with medicine, scholars from other disciplines may benefit from it as well.

This material aims to explain in an accessible, illustrative and practical form, why we cite, what basic rules should be observed when citing information sources, what citation methods we might encounter in our practice, and how we proceed when citing various types and forms of documents. When creating this material, my aim was to be as clear and concise as possible so that no other running to a few dozen (or hundreds of) pages would prove necessary, for then. Readers might gain the impression that citing is a complicated science. Therefore, only 18 out of the following 70 pages are devoted to theory, while the remaining pages show practical examples for how to create bibliographic references."

I hope that this study material will be welcomed not only by students of my course but by all others who are not certain when creating citations.

Jiří Kratochvíl, August 2014