Parenthetical citations: electronic

The past couple of weeks many of you came to ask clarifications on how to formulate parenthetical citations from electronic sources. In this post I will give you 2 examples on how to write them down.

Using parts of texts of electronic resources in your assigments posses certain particularities. First of all web pages are not numbered which means that when you have an online article for example you can't write in the parenthetical citation a page number. However, you can use paragraph numbers.

For example, you have an article of 15 paragraphs written by John Wilson . The sentence(s) of the article you want to copy in your assignment is on paragraph 6. The parenthetical citation would be as follows: (Wilson par. 6). As in print parenthetical citations you write the surname of the author, you write the abbreviation of the word paragraph which is par. and then the corresponding number.

Another issue you are most likely to encounter is to find an article without an author. In this case, and if you believe that the article is suitable for your assignment, you write in the parenthetical citation the title of the article followed by the corresponding paragraph number. If the title of the article is too long you can use the first words of the title.

For example you have an article under the title Agribusiness and you used a sentence from the second paragraph. Your in-text citation will be (Agribusiness, par. 2)