This question has no straightforward answer, because there may be multiple reasons. The first one is the conservative behaviour of authors in the individual fields, who only reluctantly give up the time-tested ways of citing according to the respective citation style. During their publication activities, authors have to follow the citation rules of their publishers. These publishers prefer one of the citation styles in that respective field, or the publishers have their own way of citing. In this way authors get used to a certain way of citing and require their students to cite in the same way, instead of preferring one of the unified styles. Another reason may be the fact that in the individual fields scholars work with different types of information sources (e.g. a doctor does not need to cite maps, while a geographer does, etc.). Moreover, not all citation styles contain models for citing all types of documents.

The ISO 690 standard is considered to provide a solution for this issue. However, this standard compared to the citation styles of individual fields (APA, ACS, NLM, CBE/CSE, MLA, and others) is not as detailed and does not cover various types of documents which authors need to cite in certain fields (e.g. citing a legal act, a poster, etc.).

Simply place the pages within one pair of brackets and separate them by a comma, e.g. (Smith 2005, pp 20, 35-37, 40) when using the author-date method or (1 pp 20, 35-37, 40) when using the numeric method (the digit 1 refers to the first bibliographic reference in the bibliography).

Although we stated at the beginning of this material that copyright law requires one to provide a citation to every source of information that an author has drawn on, you need to do this with deliberation and sense. We showed using the examples of paraphrasing and citing that if it is obvious from the wording of the text itself where the paraphrase/citation starts and ends, it is sufficient to provide just one citation. Even so we will use two examples to demonstrate the correct way of citing and the inappropriate way. At this place we should stress the word inappropriate, because due to the obligation stemming from copyright law (namely, that all information taken from elsewhere should be equipped with a citation), one cannot say that the first example is incorrect. Rather, it is just unsuitably formed compared to the second example, because, considering the construction of sentences, the beginning and end of the paraphrasing is obvious.

The examples below show a model situation in which a paragraph is made up of four sentences paraphrasing information from various pages of the same contribution in an anthology. To illustrate it better, the author-date citation method is used within the APA citation style.

In palliative care for neurological patients one encounters various manifestations of weakness. In patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis one can observe, for example, disorders of fine motor skills (Ridzoň and Kabelka, 2007, p. 252-253). Patients with genetically conditioned myopathy show symptoms of Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Becker muscular dystrophy (Ridzoň and Kabelka, 2007, p. 255-256). Difficulties in moving are typical of patients with Parkinson’s disease, and these difficulties include tremors, rigidity or hypokinesis (Ridzoň and Kabelka, 2007, p. 257-258). Ridzoň, P. & Kabelka, L. (2007). Paliativní péče u neonkologických onemocnění. In O. Sláma, L. Kabelka & J. Vorlíček (Eds.), Paliativní medicína pro praxi (pp. 251-299). Praha, Czechia: Galén.

In palliative care for neurological patients one encounters various manifestations of weakness. In patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis one can observe, for example, disorders of fine motor skills Patients with genetically conditioned myopathy show symptoms of Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Becker muscular dystrophy. Difficulties in moving are typical of patients with Parkinson’s disease, and these difficulties include tremors rigidity or hypokinesis (Ridzoň and Kabelka, 2007, p. 252-253, 255-256, 257-258). Ridzoň, P. & Kabelka, L. (2007). Paliativní péče u neonkologických onemocnění. In O. Sláma, L. Kabelka & J. Vorlíček (Eds.), Paliativní medicína pro praxi (pp. 251-299). Praha, Czechia: Galén.

In bibliographic references to online documents you should provide the date that the document was accessed. This means that if for example the NLM citation style proceeds this date by the word “cited”, it may create the impression that you should enter the date when you wrote the citation into your document. However, you should provide the date when you displayed the publication. Imagine the following situation: In 2010, you downloaded an article from a database which you intended to use in an article you were working on and you cited it in the text immediately. In 2014 you wrote a graduate thesis and draw information from the article you downloaded in 2010, but it was already deleted from the database. If the words such as cited were taken literally, i.e. the date when you cited the article from the database, it would be nonsense. That is, you would be claiming that this article was still available on the internet in 2014, although this is not the case. However, if you enter the date when you displayed the document on the internet and downloaded it, everything is correct, because you claim by this data that in 2010, the article was available in the database on the address provided and that you accessed it then. That is the reason why a number of citation styles prefers the word accessed to cited (or their synonyms). For example, ACS, AMA and Chicago citation styles require accessed or ISO 690 viewed, and therefore in this document we use accessed rather than cited or similar.

The form of the citation within the text may vary because every citation style has its own rules. The numeric citation methods are easy, you just write the relevant number referring to the respective entry of the bibliographic reference in the bibliography. If you cite according to the author-date method, you need to bear in mind that every work has an author and therefore you need to determine whether you can find their name and surname. If you know the name, enter it into the citation. If not, look into the citation style for a solution for what to write in the citation. This is usually a word expressing that the work is anonymous, e.g. Anonymous, Anonym, etc. Some citation styles, however, require you to write a certain number of the words from the title. The bibliographic reference to such work then starts with the word such as Anonymous. Anonym, or in the case of using the words from the title, with the first fully meaningful word, etc.

Whether one is dealing with a text, mediums such as video or sound that arose a century ago, and it is published on the internet as an electronic document you need to find the relevant model of the bibliographic reference in the citation style (e.g. a digitized book available on the internet = online book). If the style does not have a model for the relevant online document, you can use the model for its printed version and add details typical of an online publication to the bibliographic reference, i.e. the type of the document, the accessed date, and the URL of the document (primarily the direct link to the document, not to a webpage referring to the document).

If you use the footnote citation method and, besides the bibliographic references, you want to place a note or an explanation for the main text into a footnote and this note was taken over from a different source, provide the relevant bibliographic reference directly after it (see note 1 in the example below).

In palliative care for neurological patients one encounters various manifestations of weakness. In patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis one can observe, for example, disorders of fine motor skills. Patients with genetically conditioned myopathy show symptoms of Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Becker muscular dystrophy. Difficulties in moving are typical of patients with Parkinson’s disease, these difficulties include tremors, rigidity or hypokinesis2.

Firstly, go through the document carefully in order to determine whether the information is not really there somewhere. Such searching may be problematic, especially with an online document such as websites. We often face the fact that a website lacks, for example, the place of publication and the publisher. If that is the case try to click on the contact information to see whether the necessary details are not provided there.

Should the detail really be missing, you may look into a library catalogue (e.g. the Library of Congress) to see if the document is listed there with all the information needed for a bibliographic reference. Another way is to search for the missing information on the internet. Just bear in mind this all needs to be done rationally, do not spend more than a couple of minutes on searching for the missing information. Although on one hand it is good to provide maximum information to allow unambiguous identification of the document cited, on the other hand it is not your duty to find all the information.

Last but not least, do not forget to place any information from a source other than the document itself in square brackets. In the case of online documents, information found within one server does not need to be placed in square brackets (e.g. you cite from the webpage on the address http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/leukemia, and you find the information about the place of publication and the publisher on the webpage with contact http://www.cancer.gov/global/contact).

There is no straightforward answer to this question. Usually you can find a recommendation that a statement should be supported by at least three sources, but of course it may happen that less than three sources are available for the given statement. Moreover, you can take the into consideration the prestige of the author and the work you cite. In fact, if it is a well-known and undisputed expert in the given field, it is sufficient to refer only to this without providing further information sources.

In this case it is a so-called secondary citation when you need to provide information which was published in a work not available to you, but you have taken the information from a publication whose author was able to access this work. Due to the mediated nature of this information, you should resort to this type of citing only in the most urgent cases when the cited document is really inaccessible (not just in a library in a different town, but if it really is a unique work which is a part of an archive, e.g. a chronicle, register of births and deaths, manuscripts, etc.).

In the example of a secondary citation according to JAMA style provided below, the situation is as follows: a team led by Rudolf Brázdil paraphrase in their article “European floods during the winter 1783/1784” a verbatim quotation from the diary of a priest named Van Postel, who was an inhabitant of the Dutch town of Venlo. However, they took this information not from the diary itself but from Gaston Demaré’s article “The catastrophic floods of February 1784 in and around Belgium”.

If the citation style you use does not specify the process of citing a foreign-language publication, the usual process is to write the verbatim quotation translated into the language you are writing in and to provide the original in a note apparatus (in the footnote, at the end of the chapter), so that the reader can verify the correctness of the translation. If you are writing a text in English and quoting a statement originally in German, place the English translation into the text and provide the German original in a note.

You usually come across articles signed with a pseudonym when citing newspaper articles. When citing a text signed with a pseudonym, it is necessary to first consult the instructions of the respective citation style whether it describes what to do. If the instructions do not provide any model, try to find (e.g. on the internet) whether the pseudonym is not connected to a name and surname of an author who uses this pseudonym. If you find the name and surname, enter this information in square brackets into the bibliographic reference, as this is a piece of information obtained from a different source. If you do not find the name and surname of the author, look into the citation style how to proceed when citing a work from an unknown author (some styles instruct you to enter the word Anonymous or an abbreviation thereof, while others tell you to leave out the detail about the author and start the bibliographic reference with the title of the work).

First try to find the documents on the internet again. As long as the document is still available online, it should not pose any problem these days with the possibilities offered by today’s internet search engines. If you cannot find the document, then that is really problematic, because how could you cite, for example, a webpage without providing its URL? In such case you should use other information sources. If your original source is really irreplaceable, it is advisable to supply the passage where you are drawing from such a source with a note justifying why you did not enter the relevant data into the bibliographic reference. This, however, should be the last resort.

Yes. Go through the document and fill in the details that were not downloaded into the record in the citation manager. If you cite documents that also have a printed version, it can be useful to download the record from the catalogue/database and complement it with details that can be found from the cited document only. For example, if you cite an online book whose printed version is available in your library, download the record from its catalogue and enter in the information typical of an online book, i.e. the accessed date, direct link to the online version of the book, and similar).

Do not bother with this, just cite the version which you took information from. That is, if you know about the existence of the article from 1994, but you read only its translated version from 2005, cite the translated version. Naturally, in the event that you are a linguist dealing with the quality of a translation and you are comparing the original text with its translation, then you should cite both articles.