LINGUIST List 3.594

Sun 19 Jul 1992

Disc: Citing LINGUIST

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1. Stephen P Spackman, Re: 3.593 Citing LINGUIST

Message 1: Re: 3.593 Citing LINGUIST

John.M.Lawlerum.cc.umich.edu provides valuable comments on the information
that should be present in an electronic citation (such as to Linguist). I'd
like to add some comments about the form of such citations:

Suffixing ".internet" to internet addresses is a bad idea, since there is a
very real sense in which RFC 822 domain addresses are a standard; worse yet,
the suffix syntactically conforms to the standard but won't work (because there
is no top level .internet domain). Since as far as I know all of the other
networks are proprietary or national, we would do well to restrict ourselves to
internet and/or X.400 addressing - which by now is usable information for
almost eveyone anyway. That said, the official convention for embedding 822
addresses in text fields is to surround them in ASCII angle brackets, and it
avoids both syntactic and semantic confusion to adopt this convention
elsewhere. (It has the added benefit that if the copy is machine readable the
address can be used directly, without further editing).

In addition, it is essential to note the mode of access of an archive (in this
case ascii-mode anonymous ftp) and to give people enough information to locate
the "publisher" - which in this case is presumably NOT Anthony's and Helen's
email addresses, but the linguist-request address (Journal editors are not
usually cited, but approximate addresses of obscure publishers are). So here's
 my version:

 Christine Kamprath <LIFY460orange.cc.utexas.edu>. "Re: 3.562 Accents:
 LINGUIST in the news". In Linguist List 3.575 (July 1992)
 <linguisttamvm1.tamu.edu>. Archive ftp (ascii)
 anonymouslinguistics.archive.umich.edu:
 linguistics/linguist.list/volume.3/no.551-600 .

(Note that I've inserted a space between the filename and the trailing period.
Since the '.' character is legal at the end of a Unix filename, this
distinction too is essential).

stephen p spackman spackmandfki.uni-sb.de
 _________________________

[Moderators' note: This seems like a very sensible format to us. In fact,
we're thinking of adding the Lawler/Spackman citation form (as above)
to the LINGUIST "How-To's". However, we'll wait a bit to see if other
worthwhile suggestions grow out of this discussion.

-Helen & Anthony]