8. On Referencing and Citing the Newsletter and Other Internet Documents,
by John M. Andresen

This is an essay on referencing and citing Internet documents, with special attention to citing this issue and future issues of Hopewell Archeology. The essay begins with a true story about an archaeologist, his conference paper, and the archaeological community. It might seem at first that the introductory story has nothing to do with the Internet, but I hope to show by the end of this essay that the story relates to Internet citation and referencing in several ways.

William W. Wasley was a staff archeologist for the Arizona State Museum, Tucson, from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, during which time he conducted fieldwork and research within the Hohokam culture area, located in southern and central Arizona and largely concentrated in the low Sonoran Desert. His previous fieldwork and research had been within the puebloan Southwest, largely to the east and northeast of the Hohokam area.

When Wasley began working in the Hohokam area, the dominant thinking held that the Hohokam Classic period (ca. AD 1150–1450, the last of four periods) was caused by an influx of puebloan Salado people, whose homeland was in the higher country adjacent to and northeast of the Hohokam area. According to the established scenario, Salado people peacefully moved into the Hohokam area and shared their pottery, their burial methods, and their ideas about architecture, which eventually resulted in the monumental architecture that defines the Hohokam Classic period.

His staff position and the contracts held by the Arizona State Museum enabled Wasley to conduct fieldwork within the Hohokam area at previously unexcavated sites, and he participated with Emil Haury in the reexcavation of the famous site of Snaketown. His research led him to conclude that developments leading to the Classic period were more gradual than might be expected from the sudden influx of Saladoan people, and that outside influences came from Mesoamerica to the south rather than from any puebloan group to the north or northeast.

In the early 1960s, Wasley had published bits and pieces of his thinking in project-specific reports. In 1966, he brought together all his ideas and his database into a single paper and presented it at the 31st annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, held in Reno, Nevada. He took along several mimeographed copies of the report to give away; there were no illustrations. The paper was humbly entitled “Hohokam Classic Period” (Wasley 1966).

His paper generated tremendous interest. Some of his ideas were considered radical at that time; other ideas were considered new and insightful. Wasley had presented a paper that his colleagues could not ignore, whether they agreed with him or not. Almost immediately, colleagues began citing Wasley’s conference paper, sometimes favorably and sometimes not. His paper sparked much formal and informal discussion, and the paper was cited throughout the 1ate 1960s and the entire 1970s by nearly everyone writing about the Hohokam Classic period.

Tragically, Wasley died in an automobile accident soon after he gave his 1966 conference paper. He did not live to refine his ideas or to participate in the revolution he helped start. Nevertheless, his paper was so widely cited that one could get a good sense of what it contained by analyzing how it was cited and by reading what others said about it. Interestingly, there were far more citations of Wasley’s paper throughout the 1970s than could be accounted for by the few copies known to exist. The spread of inexpensive photocopying in the 1970s probably helped increase the number copies in archeologists’ files. But it also appears that a few scholars were citing it without having attended the conference or without having a copy in hand.

The continuing citation of this rare, unpublished paper became an increasingly odd academic situation. The Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society resolved the problem in 1980 by publishing Wasley’s original 1966 text accompanied by a special introduction for historical context by David E. Doyel (Doyel and Wasley 1980). By this time, Wasley’s ideas no longer seemed as radical as they had in 1966, but its 1980 publication at the very least plugged a long-standing hole in the available literature of Hohokam archeology.

Location and Availability

The story of William Wasley and his 1966 paper is not unique; rather, it is an extreme example of something common in the experience of all archeologists. We are all familiar with the citation and listing of conference papers presented at national and regional meetings, and all of us have encountered problems getting copies of all the papers we would like to have, especially when we have been unable to attend a particular conference. With enough persistence, we can usually obtain a copy of a paper that we really want, but sometimes the presenter has no hard copies to distribute and is usually under no obligation to create any.

The traditional archeological literature is full of ephemeral, rare, and hard-to-obtain documents. Some documents exist for years only in the minds and files of individual archeologists, as was the case for 14 years with respect to Wasley’s conference paper. Other, less-celebrated papers remain that way forever. Location and availability are closely related. If a document such as Wasley’s 1966 paper has no fixed and permanent location, to what extent can it be considered available? Availability in such cases depends on chance circumstances and the kindness of others. The same is true of the availability of the gray literature.

The Internet has dramatically increased the quantity of documents with questionable long-term availability. The uncertainty in long-term availability is the direct result of uncertain future Internet location. Basic computer users have no control over when a document is posted, taken down, moved to a different location, revised, indexed, and so on. It is entirely possible that the location information you use today to obtain a document will become incorrect within a year or two.

The Internet has not introduced a new factor into the fundamental nature of the archeological literature. Instead, the Internet has quickly increased the proportion of ephemeral documents. There has been a quantitative, rather than a qualitative, change. For some purposes, it is helpful to think of the Internet as a very large, ongoing conference. When a person presents a paper, whether in a traditional live conference or in the electronic conference of the Internet, that paper is immediately available to the attendees. In both presentation formats, the continued availability of each paper becomes highly idiosyncratic, with many factors converging on a simple probability—as time increases, the chance of locating the paper decreases. This is equally true for the Internet as it is for a traditional live conference.

One should apply the same judgment and standards in citing Internet documents as one normally applies to conference papers. The uses and citations of Internet documents do not present any new problems. They are the same old problems that have been around for many, many years. The only difference with the Internet is the quantity of such material. It has always been the case, and will continue to be so, that a scholar must take responsibility for what research materials are used and how they are used. In this respect, the Internet has changed nothing.

Reference and Citation Guidelines

Permanency of location is an issue that has bedeviled Internet users and creators of citation formats for many years. There have been many attempts to confer some sort of permanency on Internet documents through the development and application of complex and elaborate referencing formats. With minute variations in formatting, these guidelines attempt to cover every conceivable situation one might encounter with respect to any electronic document. Most of these guidelines require the person applying the format to know a good deal about the Internet. There is perhaps an even bigger problem for the innocent reader. If you haven’t already memorized the guidelines for the format you are trying to decipher in someone else’s References Cited section, then you will have considerable difficulty interpreting the reference itself and finding the item of interest. There are too many such referencing guidelines to cite and list here; Patrias (2001) is just one example.

We have found it necessary to cite earlier Hopewell Archeology newsletter articles in later newsletter articles—using, of course, the same format of academic reference listing that is normally applied to a journal. Although all earlier issues are available electronically, they were always primarily available as hard copy. As such, referenced Hopewell Archeology articles were easily cited and formatted for listing in the References Cited section at the end of an article.

With this issue, that situation changes. Unfortunately for the editor, the new online-only format will add a layer of complexity to the reference formatting of future articles that cite something in this issue or later issues of Hopewell Archeology. Fortunately for the editor, there are simple guidelines in place at the Midwest Archeological Center to cover such a contingency. One purpose of this essay is to introduce to our readers to what those guidelines consist of and how these might be applied to an online-only format, such as we now have with Hopewell Archeology.

The most recent version of the Midwest Archeological Center style guide is divided into several interlinked subsection and distributed as a group of PDF files, which all fit on a single 3.5-inch floppy disk, and could easily be sent as email attachments, and placed on the office intranet for easy access by Center employees. The style guide consists of one central file containing the core of style guidelines with three linked, separate files entitled Enhancing Readability (an essay on headings), References Cited (a major topic of its own), and Citing Internet Sources. For the first time, we are making this collection available to the public.

The last of the files mentioned in the previous paragraph is the subject of the remainder of this column. For those who can’t wait, click here to open Citing Internet Sources. Please note that the linked file is an Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) file, and you might need to upgrade your version of Adobe Reader to Version 6, which is available free at their website, http://www.adobe.com.

In general structure, the format for listing an Internet source is very much like that for a traditional hard copy book, journal, or thesis. There is the usual author, date, document title, series or institution name when applicable, location details, and additional information to help the reader locate the item. When outlined like this, it all seems very simple, and often it is that simple.

However, there are many kinds of “Internet documents” with all types of authorship situations, ambiguous or multiple dates, ambiguous or missing document titles, location details prone to instant and unannounced change, and a host of other complexities that most seasoned Internet users are already quite familiar with and are too numerous and varied to list here. How, then, do we squeeze unprecedented variability and complexity into a simple, traditional format? That question is answered in detail in our Citing Internet Sources and discussed in general terms in the next few paragraphs.

Guidelines Used at the Midwest Archeological Center

For reasons explained in detail elsewhere, email messages and documents on CD are not part of this discussion. An email message is treated as a traditional personal communication, and a document on CD is treated like a hardcopy book or a traditional publication series. For a fuller discussion of this issue and the underlying rationale, refer to pp. 6–7 in the Midwest Archeological Center’s References Cited section of the style guide.

Perhaps the most important issue of all is that there is nothing new about Internet citation that hasn’t been already treated in traditional style guides and other academic writing manuals. Long before there was an Internet, there were documents without titles, documents with uncertain or corporate authorship, documents with missing, unknown, or estimated dates, no established location, no clear revision date, documents existing in draft form only, and no publisher. Usually not all for of these problems would apply to a single document, but every archive has at least one exception.

The Center’s guidelines make use of special characters traditionally used to indicate special types of information, and these special characters can be adapted to Internet document citation formats. Quotation marks always indicate a string of text that has been exactly transcribed word for word from something. Square brackets always enclose comments or clarifications inserted by an author, transcriber, or editor. More recently, angled brackets have become the standard way of enclosing Internet location information, which is usually a web site address but might be an ftp location or an email address.

Putting it all together, the Midwest Archeological Center Internet Citation Guidelines use long-standing, pre-Internet ways of dealing with uncertain reference information in combination with traditional and universally recognized punctuation. This allows an author to create Internet reference listings that are understandable even to those who are not directly familiar with the Midwest Archeological Center Internet Citation Guidelines.

A significant degree of responsibility and creativity falls upon the author or other creator of a references cited entry. There will be many situations when a certain bit of information is not spelled out for you in an obvious place, and you will have to do a little more searching and thinking than is normally required for creating a references cited entry for a traditional book or journal. The job is not as daunting as it might seem at first, and a little bit of practice will go a long way.

It is important to keep in mind is that the placing of an Internet document’s reference details into a format—any format—and listing it within a formally prepared References Cited section of a report does not confer any special legitimacy on that document. Similarly, the fact that it was found on the Internet does not detract from its legitimacy or usefulness. The author must make judgments and take responsibility for what references are used and how they are used. This has been true for as long as there have been books with bibliographies and journals with references cited.

For further discussion and details, refer to Citing Internet Documents introduced above. The following example reference listing shows how to use the Center’s guidelines to reference Ann Bauermeister’s article in this issue of the newsletter:

Bauermeister, Ann C.
2004 “Survey and Excavations in 2004 at 33RO1059.” [Hopewell Archeology, Vol. 6, No. 1, Article 4] <http://www.cr.nps.gov/mwac/hopewell/v6n1/four.htm>. Document dated September 2004; accessed October 2004. If the specific location information fails, go to the Midwest Archeological Center home page at <http://www.cr.nps.gov/mwac/> for directions to the Hopewell news-letter directory.

References Cited

Patrias, Karen
2001 National Library of Medicine Recommended Formats for Bibliographic Citation, Supplement: Internet Formats. U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Reference Section, Bethesda, Maryland.

Society for American Archaeology
1992 Editorial Policy, Information for Authors, and Style Guide for American Antiquity and Latin American Antiquity. American Antiquity 57(4):749–770.

2003 “Editorial Policy, Information for Authors, and Style Guide for American Antiquity and Latin American Antiquity” [PDF downloaded from SAA web site] <http://www.saa.org/publications/Styleguide/styleGuide.pdf> Document revised 21 January 2003; accessed 05 February 2003.

Wasley, William W.
1966 Classic Period Hohokam. Paper presented at the 31st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Reno, Nevada.

Wasley, William W., and David E. Doyel
1980 Classic Period Hohokam. The Kiva 45(4):337–352.

word .doc (69K)

pdf (32K)