When citing an interview, you should take into consideration how it went and how it was recorded. In the case of a personal interview, when you for example cite an interview with the supervisor of your graduate thesis, citation styles usually recommend that you provide the relevant information about the interview in the text itself instead of creating a bibliographic reference. You can for example use a sentence such as When I consulted Prof. Novak about this matter on 10 July 2014, he pointed out that….

In the case of recorded interviews, e.g. in a discussion forum, radio/TV programme, etc. it is necessary to differentiate on which type of medium the record is saved (file to be downloaded or a stream on a webpage, a record on a CD/DVD/cassette). According to the medium, you should search for a relevant model for the bibliographic reference. For example, if the record is a file for download or an inserted object on a webpage, you should proceed similarly as in the above-mentioned reference to a presentation that is either for download or as an object on a webpage.

Naturally, it may also happen that the citation style does not contain a model for a bibliographic reference to an interview or to the type of the document comprising the given interview. In such case it is necessary to search for instructions for a bibliographic reference to a similar document in the citation style (e.g. if there is no model for a reference to an interview on a video cassette, use the model for an audio tape). If, however, the citation style does not include a model for an at least somewhat similar document, you can look at the format for such a bibliographic reference in another citation style and adjust it to the style of your document (e.g. if the other style required writing the surname of the author in capital letters, we would still use normal case according to the NLM style).

Unrecorded personal interview

As was mentioned above, when citing an interview, citation styles often require formulating the sentence so that it is obvious that the following paraphrase of a verbatim citation is an idea taken from the given interview, rather than creating a bibliographic reference for the interview.

Other citation styles (the NLM style is among them) provide a concrete example for a bibliographic reference to an interview. Due to the nature of the information source, i.e. a personal interview, displaying the source of information is not part of the bibliographic reference below. Moreover, this is a fictitious interview, in which the author of this text answered a question from a colleague from abroad.

Kratochvíl, Jiří (University Campus Library, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia). Conversation with: Ewa Rozkosz (Biblioteka, Dolnośląska Szkoła Wyższa, Wrocław, Poland). 2013 Aug 15.