School of Information Management & Systems.
142  Access to American Cultural Heritages.   Buckland. Fall 1997.

Bibliographic style .

The one important rule is that enough information must be supplied to identify the source unambiguously. Also be consistent and accurate.

Books: Include at least: author/main entry, title, publisher, place, date; more generously add: subtitle, series, vols or pagination.

Articles in periodicals: Include at least: author, journal title, volume number, year, pages; more generously: article title and issue number.

Practice varies between publishers and between disciplines. Publishers require adherence to their "house style" concerning exact details of presentation: Spell out forenames, invert forenames/initials of second author, italicise title, punctuation, &c. Journals usually print "Instructions to authors" regularly; look at some recent issues to identify required style. For books examine examples of publisher's books and ask for guidelines.

Best general guide is The Chicago Manual of Style. 14th ed. 1993. 900 pages of detailed guidance on many aspects of writing and book production: punctuation, proof-reading, indexes, spelling, capitalizing, &c., &c.

Note increasing use of "author-date" style: Cite reference in text by mentioning authors name and year of publication, e.g. "Previous theories (Morton 1965; Sanchez 1976) were disproved by Jones (1987)." List of references contains year of publication following authors name:
Morton, J. 1965. A Theory of Style. Oakland: Duncan.

Information not derived from the document is usually supplied in [square brackets].

Information found on gophers, listservs and at World Wide Web sites: Specify the address (location), the title, and the date and time seen (if known, the date posted).

See The Chicago Manual of Style for examples.

Li, Xia & Nancy B. Crane. 1993. Electronic Style: A Guide to Citing Electronic Information. Westport, CT: Meckler. MOFF Reference PN171.D37.45
Sides, Charles. 1991. How to write and present technical information. Oryx. ENGIN T11.S528 1991
Weiss, Edmond H. 1991. How to write usable user documentation. 2nd ed. Oryx. ENGIN QA76.165 W44 1991 (1st ed. in MAIN)