Version: February 9, 2007
 

Guidelines for Attribution and Citation in Internet Research Papers

Table of Contents

• What is an online paper (htm and pdf)
• Internal division of an html paper
• Attribution of conventional sources (published books and journal articles)
• Attribution of general web documents
• Using an appendix for source materials
• Plagiarism
  
• Notes
• Samples References
• Sample Appendix (for demonstration purposes)

What is an "online paper"?

An alternative to html for an online paper is the pdf (portable data format). Many organizations, especially government agencies, use this format, as it allows complete control over the page layout (which is lost when converting to htm). However, you would need the full Adobe Acrobat software at a cost of about $140 (academic edition of version 8) to produce such files; while the Adobe/Acrobat Reader (to view such documents) is free. Starting with version 6 (released in 2003), there are several new features (including better access for people for visual impairments) which makes pdf an even more attractive alternative for producing online papers, but the full product runs on Windows 2000/XP only. You can access the full version 7 (and hopefully 8 at some point)  in the Hunter labs. This version (released in January 2005) also allows the inclusion of animations and multimedia material.  The version 8 Reader is still free, but now even the Reader requires Windows XP.

As to your paper (first draft and final version), I expect htm format, but you are free to use whatever software you are comfortable with to produce this document in htm format. I assume that most of you will use some version of  MS Word (2000,  XP/2002, or 2003) and its built-in htm conversion.
 

Internal division of an html paper

Named "fragments" can be used for both internal links (within the same document) and external links (links in other documents pointing to a specific part of your document). A very common use of internal links is for a table of contents which you may want to put at the very start of your paper (as in this document). But you can use such internal links anywhere in your document -- whenever you feel it is useful to remind the reader of an argument made before and/or some evidence introduced above or below. Internal links are particularly simple. Instead of an URL (something like "http://maxweber.cuny.edu/socio/index.htm") they simply use a hash mark followed by the name of the bookmark/target/anchor (something like "#internal"). For those, who have ventured a bit into the actual htm language, the complete "tag" for an internal links looks like this: <a href="#internal">.....anchor text....</a>. For external links, the part sufficient for internal links is simply added to the normal URL (like "http://maxweber.cuny.edu/socio/index.htm#hot").

To summarize: In addition to what you would do in a conventional paper, you need to name specific fragments (points in your paper to which you want to send a reader directly) and this "sending directly" is done via internal links. Named fragments also allow external links to point to a specific part of your paper rather than just to the start.
 

Attribution of conventional sources (published books and journal articles)

There are two exceptions to my laissez-faire attitude about which style you use: 

• Some (older) styles suggest that all bibliographic information is put in a footnote/endnote. This is a very bad choice for an online paper and must be avoided. Since there is no fixed page layout, there can be no footnotes in an htm paper. While there can be endnotes in an htm paper, the use of endnotes should be limited to when it is necessary to provide further substantive information and/or  to pursue a side issue and where the inclusion of these additional thoughts or facts into the main body of the text would be a distraction. If endnotes are necessary, you need to use the "named fragment and internal link" approach discussed in the preceding section.[1]
• Most common styles do not require to include a link to an online location of the full text (even when available). I do require to include such links and I have created a slight modification of the APA style to include such links. This style is called "GSR716", and I suggest you use this style for your paper.

The preferred way of making an attribution to a published work is to include author and year; either both in parenthesis or by adding the year of the publication in parentheses to the author name's when this name is part of the text anyway.  Again, I recommend consulting a standard textbook (e.g., Raimes 2008)  on writing if you are unsure on how to handle this in a conventional paper. Raimes (2005) is one of my favorite textbooks, and if this does not enough detail for you, there is a larger "handbook" version as well (Raimes and Jerskey  2008). As to publications with more than one author, the different styles have different rules as to how many you need to include and how exactly to list them in the reference section, but I don't care about these nitty-gritty details. For books, consider adding internal links  to the bibliographical details using the  author name as an anchor -- as I did above.  For journal articles available online, you should rather link to the full text (see below).

These days, there are still relatively few books available in electronic format (online), but when it comes to journal articles chances are that the full text is available online.  If this is the case, a link to the online source of the article must be added. However, you need to be careful that the link you add is a "persistent" link. In most online data bases, you use a search engine to locate a specific article and in many cases the URL which appears in the address box of your browser window is not persistent. It may work for a few hours, sometimes even for a day or two, but then it ceases to work. When checking whether a specific URL is persistent, make sure that you empty the cache of your browser first [2], or you may be fooled into the thinking that the URL is persistent because the document is displayed from the browser's cache rather than from the source, and, consequently, the link would not work on another computer.  Detailed instructions for finding persistent URLs for the most commonly used journal databases are provided in a separate document.

• Zunes (1998) looks at the American peace movement and its role regarding the United States-led war against Iraq and the long-standing US support for Israeli policies toward its Arab neighbors.
• The peace movement was unable to stop the Gulf War (Zunes 1998).

• the generic URL which looks like this: http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?AN=612500&db=aph& or
• the Hunter EZ proxy version which can take one of two forms, the second one is preferable: 
• http://search.epnet.com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/direct.asp?AN=612500&db=aph&  
• http://proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/login?url=http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?AN=612500&db=aph&

PDF version of journal articles. When using the htm version of an online journal article, we are not able to make precise page references to specific parts of the journal article (as you should when you use a verbatim quote as well as when you paraphrase a specific argument), and with Zunes article mentioned above, we are out of luck, no pdf version is currently available. But here is a quotation from another article:

• Our results show that the process of gaining and losing insurance differs substantially between immigrant groups. Undocumented immigrants have the highest uninsured rates (Table I) and are most disadvantaged in socioeconomic terms (Table 2). (Prentice et al., 2005:113).

General recommendation: When you are still just screening articles, use the htm version. Once you decide that an article will be an important source for your paper, get the pdf version (if available) so that you can properly cite and quote using page numbers.
 

Adding the URL to reference section. The URL for the online source of a journal should also be added to the reference section. Here, however, you should add the URL as visible text -- as even online papers get printed out, because many people find it hard to read a paper on screen only. But you should also make the visible text of the URL an anchor for a link to this location (see the reference section of this document for an example). When you use MS Word to write your document, you can set an option which provides for automatic conversion of any text starting with "http://" into a link [4]. This may even be the default setting. So, there is little extra work involved.

The exact form of how you add the URL varies with the style (MLA, APA, etc.) you pick. Some styles require that the URL is place in angle brackets ( <  ....   > ), some require to precede the URL with the string "Available at:", but these are the nitty-gritty details I don't care about. A word of warning, though. Some these URLs  can be quite long and complicated. Avoid retyping URLs -- always copy-and-paste. In particular, if you have printed out the journal article yourself, the URL (or part thereof) may show on your printout (depending on how you have set up your browser), but very likely it is not the complete URL. Whenever you see a string of dots embedded in what you may think is the complete URL, it is not the complete URL. There are no working URLs which include a series of dots (like http://infotrac.com/webrequest/...../ajs45367.htm).  Of course, by using EndNote and the EndNote/MS Word interface these  problems are avoided anyway.

Attribution of general web documents

Choice of anchor and target page. By "anchor" I mean the string of visible text that you turn into a hyperlink (typically shown in blue and underlined -- though you could make other choices). In case of journal articles, it is obvious where the link will lead you; but this is not true in case of general web documents. As a matter of fact, in a conventional paper you do not use a lot of such "primary sources". With respect to such primary sources, there are two ground rules:

• Identify the owner/sponsor (in most cases an organization, but sometimes an individual) who is responsible for the contents of the site in the full text. When a reader clicks a link he/she should already know where the link leads to. Make sure that you focus on the contents owner; often, smaller organization have their web sites hosted by a commercial service. When the owner is widely known (e.g., a university or a government agency) there is no need for a discussion or introduction, but otherwise at least a brief characterization -- possibly including a link to the "about" page of the organization -- is in order, like:
• The People for the American Way (PFAW), a liberal organization which characterizes itself as an organization which is "fighting to maintain and expand 50 years of legal and social justice progress that right-wing leaders are trying to dismantle", supports the legislation on election reform recently introduced by Senator Obama and has stated its position in a press release saying .....
• Link to specific pages on a web site, but refrain from including the exact same link over and over again. Again be very specific about where the link will lead to so that the reader can make an intelligent choice whether or not to follow the link. Keep in mind that links are supplements only; the paper must be self-contained and stand on its own -- in case an Internet connection is not available. The online format of the paper is supposed to provide an added opportunity to check on the sources of the author; its function is not to make writing a complete paper unnecessary. In the example above, the rest of the sentence should summarize the reasons why PFAW supports Obama's proposal; the reader should not be forced to visit the page to find out.

Non-persistence of web documents. The persistence problem is even more prevalent when considering general web documents and it comes in several varieties:

• Using a site search engine leads to a temporary link (e.g., the Thomas site for legislative information), the same type of problem as discussed above. Again, the first solution is to find a persistent link to the same document and in many cases this is possible (certainly possible for Thomas and GPO -- the Government printing Office) .The second best solution is to find the same document elsewhere (with a persistent link) using a very specific search string culled from the document already located. The special government search Google offers is often helpful when trying to locate legal information, but you still have to make sure that the source can be trusted, can be considered as "primary" or a reasonable approximation thereof. The third best solution is to describe the process of locating the specific document within the larger site in an endnote (see example for Roper Center data within Lexis-Nexis below, appendix #2).
  
• The page is an "active server page" (often, but not always identified by an .asp at the end of the URL; example from NYT site). In this case, the page contents follows a pre-set structure, but the actual pieces of information are retrieved from an underlying data base and are likely to change frequently. If the specific content of a page is important, you must download this file and save it on your own computer [5] (rather than just saving it as a "bookmark" [Firefox] or "favorite" [MS IE]). As an alternative, you can take a "screenshot" showing the relevant part of the page at a specific point in time and store this screen shot. This topic is discussed in more detail in a separate document.
  
• A web site uses "frames" and most pages consist of several frames, e.g., our Bb course site makes heavy use of frames. At sites using frames, the URL in the address/location box often does not change at all and saving this address will not reproduce the document you are really interested in. E.g., if you click on the link to display the document  "Paper Assignment" on the course web site for GSR 716 in spring 2007, the URL in the address box on top will say:
  
http://hc.bbprod.cuny.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_24014_1
But this URL does not lead to the specific document, rather it leads to the start/home page for this course. In such cases,  additional steps are needed; the details depend on the browser used.[6] Often, you can get to the actual URL, by right clicking and then selecting "open in a new window" (or a new tab). In this example the specific URL is:
http://hc.bbprod.cuny.edu/courses/1/HC_GSR_71600_001_200702/content/_275825_1/papassign.html
(However, for Bb, these URLs work only after you have logged in to the Bb system, at least as a "guest".)
• A web site uses javascript to link to a subsequent page. Again, you may not see the URL immediately, but using the same technique as described in note 6 will usually get you the URL.
• A web site uses a new window with no address box to display a document. As long as this new window has at least the basic tool bar (with the "View" menu), you can make the address box reappear: "View"/"Toolbars"/"Address bar". If there are no toolbars whatsoever, use the techniques described above (IE: right-click, properties; Firefox: right click, view page information).
• Many web sites frequently rearrange their contents and changing the whole file/document structure making saved URLs invalid as documents are shifted to different folders (a bad, but not infrequent practice). As with "active server" pages, you need to document via saving/downloading (details in the next section).

The "sources appendix"

You place such links throughout your paper wherever you would use a link to the external web site, if you had a persistent URL and confidence that the page would stay the same. However, whether you link to a downloaded web page in the appendix or to the original page on a web server elsewhere, the same rules apply as to clearly describing to what kind of document the link will lead you to. This is particular important when you link to a "named fragment" as the reader will not immediately see the heading and possibly other identifying information at the top of this page.

Listing of appendix content. Also, you need to provide a "table of contents" for such an appendix (which should be the very last section of the main paper) and each entry in this appendix TOC should be a hyperlink to the document. Each entry must contain the information which would otherwise be listed in the reference section, including the original URL (even if non-persistent) and the date of the download. Long non-persistent URLs should be shortened to the page on the remote site where your search started; instead of the complete (but by now useless) URL the search string used to locate the document should be listed. What you list as part of the appendix TOC, need not be listed in the reference section to avoid duplication.

A sample appendix. For demonstration purposes, I have included an appendix (consisting of three downloaded web pages) for this document. I have added a fragment name to the first document in the appendix so that I link directly to the issues PFAW names on its rather long start page. The second document was downloaded from the Lexis-Nexis data base and contains information about public sentiment on school voucher from a survey conducted in January 2001. As this data base is "restricted", i.e., it can be accessed via an authorization process only (via specific IP address or specific ID/password), it is always preferable to find another generally available source instead. In this example, the specific public opinion data contained in the document can also be found at the generally available web site of the Gallup organization, but on an "active service page" (see above) only and somewhat buried in a fairly long page. So, it was necessary to download this page and to add a fragment name to point to the specific part of the document. Of course, in general it is not necessary to have the same piece of information twice -- as in this demonstration.

Technical structure. From a purely technical point of view, there are two ways to organize such an appendix:

• Folder approach. You simply collect all documents (which may be a mixture of htm and pdf files with maybe some other formats thrown in) in one folder and in the end create one zip file containing your actual paper and the folder with the source files. In general, this approach is preferable, as a single file (the alternative) can get quite large -- a serious disadvantage when the paper is meant to be put on web server (like on a course web site).
• Single file approach. This works only if you have few such documents and all of them are either htm or standard browser graphic (gif, jpeg) format. Then you can simply combine all files documenting your sources into one htm file with appropriately named fragments ("bookmark"/"target").

Relative links can include a "path" as well, meaning you link to documents which are located in a subfolder of the folder where you main document resides. This is a useful device for keeping order, but it be may be "forced" upon you as well. E.g., when you save a web page (containing graphics) with MS IE or directly with MS Word 2000 (by typing an URL to a web page in place of a local file name when "opening" a file) the main (text) part of the page is saved in one file and all associated (graphics) files are saved in a subfolder. This subfolder has the same name as the main files, but the string "_files" is appended. -- When you place files in subfolders (relative to your main document) yourself and then have to enter a hyperlink yourself, make sure that that the link does not contain any backward slashes ("\"), all slashes must be forward slashes ("/") -- notwithstanding that such "paths" on Windows computer use backslashes. For example, enter in the box where you specify the location of the file something like:
subfolder/docs/org1.htm
not
subfolder\docs\org1.htm
though the latter is the correct way to specify a file location on a Windows computers. To make matters even more confusing, if you make this mistake, you will not notice it right away. As long as the files reside on a local computer, browsers are smart enough to figure out what you mean. But when the files get moved to a web server (e.g., on to a course web page), these backslashes will produce error messages as the files you link to cannot be found. If you have picked up a bit of html language, the full "tag" for a relative link looks like this:
<a href="subfolder/docs/org1.htm"> or
<a href="subfolder/docs/org1.htm#name">  if you link to a specific "named fragment" in the file "org1.htm".
In contrast, just a reminder "absolute" links look like this, the string you specify starts with "http://"
<a href="http://bb.hunter.cuny.edu/courses/1/2001SP-GSR716-00/content/subfolder/docs/org1.htm">
This is not a real link, don't expect it to work. But make sure that you don't leave a space before the http part, or your browser tries to interpret your link as a relative link -- and an error message will result.

Finally, you need to be careful when preparing your zip file as the "path information" must be preserved.  Check the screen movie on producing zip files.
 

A brief note on Plagiarism

Endnotes

References

Raimes, Ann. Keys for Writers: A Brief Handbook -- Fifth Edition. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2008.

Raimes, Ann and Maria Jerskey.  Universal Keys for Writers -- Second Edition. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2008.

Zunes, Stephen. "The American peace movement and the Middle East." Arab Studies Quarterly 20, 1998, p. 29-52.
http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?AN=612500&db=aph&
 
Note that I have used the generic (rather than the Hunter-specific) form of the URL and sometimes these seem to  work even without being authenticated. However, most likely you have been authenticated at some time but just not closed your Internet connection in between (many broadband users simply stay connected all the time). For your paper, you are supposed to use the Hunter-specific form of the URL. Also, there are some variations in the structure of these URLs (look for the slight differences between the URL for the Prentice piece and the Zunes article. These differences are irrelevant and have no deeper meaning or importance.  -- Also note that this is not APA/GSR716 style; e.g., APA style uses only initial letter for the first name. 

Appendix

1. People for the American Way (PFAW) web site (start page)
Original URL: http://www.pfaw.org ; page downloaded on 4/27/2001


2. Gallup Poll result on "School vouchers" (Jan 2001) as documented in Roper Center Poll data base via Lexis-Nexis
Original URL: http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/form/academic/s_roper.html
Search string: Keyword = school voucher , Roper Accession Number = 0376449
Page downloaded on 5/4/2001


3. Public opinion on "School vouchers" (Jan 2001) from Gallup Organization
Original URL: http://www.gallup.com/poll/indicators/indeducation.asp ; page downloaded 5/4/2001
(Note that the original URL no longer works; a good illustration why it is necessary to download crucial documents and place them in an appendix rather than relying on the URL to work forever.)