Citing Sources

Examples of informal citation

The best way to support your opinion, as you know, is to present relevant facts and figures. Facts and figures, however, are not so convincing if we don't tell the reader their source, because authority is important. Facts and figures gotten from hearsay, for example, has little authority, because hearsay is just what you heard in conversation. Facts or figures from a Time Magazine article, on the other hand, will have more authority, and the reader will be more likely to believe them.

We cite sources differently in journalistic and essay writing from the way we cite them in academic writing. For academic writing, the source's name, the date, the publication source, the publisher, and more details about the source are required. In journalistic and essay writing, though, we usually use more informal methods, mentioning the source only in general terms, such as the expert's name or position, or the publication in which we found the information.

Here are some examples of conventional methods of casual citation.

1. An article (A report) in the July issue of TIME Magazine reported that...
2. It was reported in TIME Magazine's July 1999 issue that...
3. Psychology Today, in a study (in research) conducted last year on blind mice, concludes that...
4. James Bierster, Director of the UN's Population Fund, says that...
5. According to a high official in Korea's Defense Ministry, ...

Note in the above samples that the reader is given some idea of the age of the information. Even item 4 implies that the information is current because the writer used present tense for says.