When do you need a reference?


If you write "Paris is a city in France" you do not need a reference. Nor do you need a reference for "Paris is the capital of the French Fifth Republic." However, if you write "Paris has often been called 'Capital of the Nineteenth Century'" then you MUST have a reference to Walter Benjamin's article by that title (and you might want, for good measure, to note a few articles or monographs that have been based on this premise).

In short, you need a reference for: direct quotations; paraphrases or summaries of other people's arguments; any information that is not "general knowledge." If you do not cite properly, you may be guilty of plagiarism, which is a crime. [College website on plagiarism]
 

References may appear in the form of footnotes (at the FOOT of the page, hence their name) or as endnotes (at the END of your essay). In either case, they include the same information:

Author, Title (Place of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication), page number/s. 
For example:
William Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Post-Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 71.

This is the standard format for a book with one author (the easiest example). Book and journal titles must be underlined or italicized; an article or chapter title is placed in quotation marks. This is not just arcane folk superstition; setting a title apart, typographically, makes it much, much easier to pick out and identify.

Notes will be longer if you are citing a chapter in an anthology, for which the format is

Author, "Chapter Title," in Editor, ed., Title (Place of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication), page number/s.
For example:
Mary Ann Doane, "The Medical Eye: Clinical Discourse in the 'Woman's Film' of the 1940s," in Susan Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 152-174.
A bibliography and end/footnote references should contain basically the same information, but in slightly different formats. A bibliography is not numbered, it does not include page references, and it lists works by alphabetical order (based on the author's surname). A bibliography may include works that do not appear in your notes, since it lists all the works you consulted for an essay, whether you cite them directly or not. Works in a bibliography are alphabetized by author's surname, traditionally "reverse indented" (that is, the first line of an entry hangs "over" the others), and give the following information:
Author's surname, given name. Title (Place of Publication: Publisher, Date). 
If it is a journal article, give the date of publication after the journal title. So, for example, here is a bibliography of five works:
Barrows, Susanna. Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968).

Douglas, Mary. "Deciphering a Meal." Daedalus 101 (1972).

-----. Purity and Danger. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,1966).

Penley, Constance. "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture." Visual Culture. Eds. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey. (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1994).

[The first entry is for a book, the second for a translated book, the third for an article in a journal, the fourth for a second work by the same author, the fifth for an article in an anthology].

REMEMBER: You also need to cite any web page you consult and you must also provide a reference for any information or analysis that comes from a lecture (either one of mine or something you learned for another course). As always, you need to tell your reader precisely where you found this information. Since websites change, you should also make clear when you accessed a particular website. For example:

Michael Bess, "Three Lessons of World War II for Today's Generation," http://hnn.us/articles/34704.html (accessed 5 Feb. 2007).

Prof. Rebecca Spang, "The Problem of Legitimacy" (lecture 25 Jan. 2007).