Citations and Bibliographic Style
for Anthropology Papers

Every discipline has its own citation and bibliographic styles. Anthropology is no exception, but many styles are acceptable as long as they are internally consistent within the manuscript on which you are working. In fact, each journal or press for whom you write may demand a particular style. As you develop your paper you should find out the preferred style. Most journals print a style guide somewhere within the journal, often inside the front or back cover, but some publish it only once a year. Inside the back cover of American Antiquity, for example, you will find a Notice to Authors. On reading that, you will find that the journal published detailed information on matters of style in the October 1992 issue (57:749-770).

Citations

Citations tell the reader from where you derived materials or where you got ideas or quotations use for your work. To acknowledge the work of others is extremely important in all fields, but anthropology is especially concerned with it. To fail to acknowledge your sources is considered to be plagiarism. More important than this, however, is to lead the reader to the original sources you used so that they can see if your use of it is reasonable or "correct" or to get further information if they need it.

Anthropologists cite other works in text, that is, they rarely use end or footnotes. Generally anthropologists believe that if something is not important enough to be in the main text, it should be left out. When you cite in text on your paper, please use the following rules (which generally apply to most in text citations):

• Place the citation as close as possible to the idea or information used, but place it so that it won't disrupt the flow of the text. This usually means at the end of a sentence, not the middle. Place citations in the middle only if multiple sources are used in a complex sentence or if a particular author is named in text.
• If at the end of a sentence, the citation goes before final punctuation. The format is as in the example below:

  "...where the beaches are difficult to excavate (Zimmerman 1994:54)."
  In this example, Zimmerman is the author's last name, 1994 is the date of publication, and 54 is the page number from which the idea or quote comes.

• If the author's name is used in text, then just the date and page number are put in parentheses as in Zimmerman (1994:76) who really spends too much time thinking about beaches.
• It is better to over cite than not to cite enough.

Bibliographic Style

Most anthropological works actually use a "references cited" approach rather than a bibliography. The former is a list only of those works you actually used and cited in text. A bibliography is a full list of sources consulted for your work whether used or not.

Each reference cited in text has a date of publication and an author. These are the keys to the "references cited" section. In this section, the authors are listed alphabetically, last name first. If several works by an author are used, these are listed by date of publication with the earliest listed first. Multiple authors of the same work are listed with the first author alpha- betically list in the section followed by the others in the order they appear on the publication.

The basic idea of this section is to allow the reader to have enough information to find the document cited so he/she can look it up. Minimal information you must have is

• full author(s) name(s),
• Full title of the work cited,
• date of publication,
• page numbers, and
• publisher.

For journal articles you need not have the publisher. You need the article title and full journal name. For specialized sources such as internet, interviews, newspapers, and the like, you need information that will take the reader to the source. How these are arranged will be journal/publisher specific, but remember that if you don't have guidelines, be internally consistent. Be certain to underline, boldface, or italicize titles if or where appropriate. Be sure to indent the proper number of spaces for dates or titles. Following are examples:

Anderson, Duane C.
1990 Letter to Steve Moore, Native American Rights Fund dated July 14, 1990. Files of author.

Anderson, Duane C., M. Pearson, A. Fisher and D. Zieglowsky, eds.
1980 Planning Seminar on Ancient Burial Grounds. Iowa City: Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa.

Anderson, Duane C., et al., eds.
1983 The Study of Ancient Skeletal Remains in Iowa: A Symposium. Iowa City: Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa.

Brues, Alice
1987 Letter to John Echo-Hawk, Native American Rights Fund dated July 13, 1987. Files of author.

Buikstra, Jane
1981 A Specialist in Ancient Cemetery Studies Looks at the Reburial Issue. Early Man 3(3):26-27.

Cybulski, J.S., N.S. Ossenberg and W.D. Wade
1979 Committee Report: Statement on the Excavation, Treatment, Analysis and Disposition of Human Skeletal Remains from Archaeological Sites in Canada. The Canadian Review of Physical Anthropology 1(1):33.

Deloria, Vine
1973 God Is Red. New York: Delta.

1977 A Conversation with Vine Deloria, Jr. Words and Places, Program 8 (video), New York: Clearwater.

Eby, Lloyd
1991 Reflections on the Philosophy of Science: The Demise of Justificationism. The World and I 6(9):530-544.

Fabian, Johannes
1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.

The single best bit of advice on preparing citations, references cited sections and bibliographies is to ask the professor which style is preferred if it is for a class paper. You may simply get an answer such as "American Anthropologist" style. If so, then go to the journal for the style guide. If you can't find it, look at the way citations and references are done and copy it carefully. If still in doubt about certain items, simply try to be consistent throughout the document.

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