Now that the number of institutional repositories and/or online research archives has grown to be a force to be reckoned with, I wanted to circulate a few tips regarding the method of referencing materials found in repositories.
When you find a paper in an institutional repository, you will in most cases see a reference to the official published version. If possible, always cite this published version, as it will result in the author(s) receiving proper recognition through services that track citation counts (e.g. Thomson’s Web of Science).
While you should always cite the published version when referencing a paper as a whole, there may be itimes (for example if you need to refer to a specific page of the article for a quote) when you will need to cite the repository version. This is because the page numbering in the repository version might not match the page numbering in the final published version. If you need to do this, for example, for any paper found in the University of Bradford online research archive “Bradford Scholars”, try the following:
Smith, C. (2009). How to reference papers in repositories. Bradford Scholars. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10454/XXXX. Replace the ‘xxxxx’ with the item handle found in the repository.
In such cases, if you or your institution has access, the advise is to click through and use the specific page reference from the published version. However, even if citing the repository version, do cite the published version as well so that the author(s) receive proper recognition, as noted above.
“Stevan Harnad furthermore advises us to:
(1) Always cite the published version if the cited work is indeed published. (The published version is the archival work; the Open Access version is merely a means of access to a supplementary version of it. It is not the published work.)
(2) Always give the URL or DOI of the Open Access version for access purposes, along with the citation to the published version.
(3) In citing (in the text) the location for quoted excerpts, use the published version’s page-span if you know them; otherwise use section-heading plus paragraph number. (Indeed, it is good to add section-heading plus paragraph-number in any case.)
The APA Style Manual advises us as follows on this issue:
In order to…cite a specific part of a source, indicate the page, chapter, figure, table or equation at the appropriate point in text. Always give page numbers for quotations. Abbreviate the words page and chapter in such text citations:
(Cheek & Buss, 1981, p.332) (Shimamura, 1989, chap. 3)
For electronic sources that do not provide page numbers, use the paragraph number, if available, preceded by the ¶ symbol or the abbreviation “para”. If neither paragraph nor page numbers are visible, cite the heading and the number of paragraph following it to direct reader to the location of the material.
(Myers, 2000, ¶ 5) (Beutler, 2000, Conclusion section, para.1)
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