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How to Cite

... an article in Loci

Loci has ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) 1941-9198. You can locate Loci items by starting at the Loci homepage. Then use Search or Advanced Search to locate the front page of the item. The address that appears in the Address Bar of your browser is the URL for that item. For example, the URL for the article `Modeling a Changing World' by Tim Chartier and Nicholas Dovido is

http://www.maa.org/publications/periodicals/loci/modeling-a-changing-world

Each of our items (articles, modules, mathlets) has a month of publication stated on its front page. The volume number is the year number minus 2007. Thus, all items published in 2008 are in Volume 1. Since we publish "continuously" (i.e., without discrete issue numbers), there is no issue number to cite. And of course we do not have page numbers except within the individual items. (Thus, one might want to refer, say, to page 6 in a specific article rather than the article as a whole -- each page also has a unique URL.)

In general, we refer to APAstyle.org for electronic reference styles. At the page cited, we find the following suggested style:

  • Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (2000).
  • Title of article. Title of Periodical, xx, xxxxxx.
  • Retrieved month day, year, from source.

Thus, an appropriate citation for the article mentioned above would be

You can adapt this to the style of the journal in which your citation is to appear, but the key items of information should all be there: author's name(s), year and month of publication, title, journal name and volume number, retrieval date, and exact URL. If your publication is on line, you may link the URL to the actual publication.

Technical Note

Technically, the ampersand symbol & is not allowed in an HTML link by itself, because this symbol is reserved in HTML for the definition of special entities (special symbols that are either reserved or are not available on the standard keyboard). For example, the less than symbol < is encoded in HTML as &lt; and the ampersand symbol itself is encoded as &amp;. Thus, the technically correct way to write the URL given above, for an HTML link, is

 

Most browsers will forgive the error in standard HTML pages, but not, for example, in XML pages that contain MathML. These pages are required to be technically correct.