Citerings

Citerings is the practice and result of acknowledging the sources that inform a scholarly or formal text. It encompasses both the act of citing—quoting or paraphrasing the ideas of others—and the formal record of those sources in a bibliography or reference list. Citerings help attribute intellectual debts, enable readers to verify claims, and situate new work within the broader scholarly conversation.

Citerings appear in several forms. In-text citings provide brief information about a source within the body of the text, using parenthetical or narrative integration. A separate bibliography, works cited, or reference section at the end of a document collects full bibliographic details for all cited works. The exact format and punctuation of citerings depend on the chosen citation style and the discipline.

Common citation styles include APA, MLA, Chicago, and Vancouver. Each style prescribes rules for the order of elements (such as author, title, date), capitalization, punctuation, and how to handle different source types (books, journal articles, websites). Many styles also specify how to handle direct quotes, paraphrasing, multiple authors, edition information, and identifiers like DOIs or URLs.

In practice, citerings rely on consistent, accurate data: author names, publication years, titles, publishers, and identifiers. Digital tools, such as reference managers and bibliographic databases, assist authors in collecting, organizing, and formatting citations. Ethical citerings require faithful representation of sources, avoidance of plagiarism, and careful verification of details to maintain credibility and support scholarly dialogue.