Citations and References

This guide describes my preferred citation and reference style for reports written in HTML.

To see how the HTML is coded, view the source code in the web browser (right-click → View Page Source).

1 Citation Style

• Enclose the citation in square brackets [...].

• Include any range specifiers, such as “pages 3-6”, “Chapter 2”, or “Table 2.3”, after the citation key and before the closing square bracket (see the examples).

  Be as specific as you can, especially for books or longer papers. The reader dos not want to have to scan a whole book to find the one paragraph you are referring to.

• See the notes below on how to form the citation key.

2 Example Citations

As Alley explains in his book, it is important to balance precision with clarity in scientific writing [All2018, Chapter 2].

Andrews describes a new hierarchy visualisation technique called Information Pyramids [And2002a].

Later in the same year, Andrews et al published a further technique for hierarchy visualisation involving recursive voronoi subdivision [And2002b].

Norman first described affordances in 1988 [Nor1988, pages 9-11], and goes into more detail in a later article [Nor1999].

3 Reference Style

• The citation key should be in author year style, using the first three letters of the first author's surname, followed by the publication year, for example [Nor1988].

  In case of ambiguity, such as multiple publications by a single author in the same year, or several authors with the same first three letters in their surname, add a single character (a, b, etc.) to disambiguate. For example, [And2002a] and [And2002b].

• References are sorted alphabetically by citation key.

• For an institutional author, such as a company or organisation, use a three-letter abbreviation. For example, UXt for UXtweak, or IET for IETF.

• For books, give an ISBN wherever possible. If you can, list an ISBN-10, and make it clickable by linking to Amazon (see the examples).

  Amazon currently uses ISBN-10 codes to form linkable URLs. Most ISBN-13s issued upto now can be converted into a corresponding ISBN-10.

• For journal and conference papers, give the DOI of the paper. Make it clickable by linking it to doi.org (see the examples).

• For web sites, blog posts, etc. give the URL and make it clickable.

  If you cannot determine a date of publication ot last update, use the date you visited.

4 Example References

[All2018]

Michael Alley; The Craft of Scientific Writing; 4^th Edition, Springer, 06 Jun 2018. ISBN 1441982876.

[And2002a]

Keith Andrews; Visual Exploration of Large Hierarchies with Information Pyramids; Proc. Sixth International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV'02) London, UK, Jul 2002, pages 793–798. doi:10.1109/IV.2002.1028871

[And2002b]

Keith Andrews, Wolfgang Kienreich, Vedran Sabol, et al; The InfoSky Visual Explorer: Exploiting Hierarchical Structure and Document Similarities; Information Visualization, Vol. 1, No. 3/4, Palgrave-Macmillan, Dec 2002, pages 166–181. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ivs.9500023.

[Nor1988]

Donald Norman; The Psychology of Everyday Things; Basic Books, 13 Jun 1988. ISBN 0465067093.

[Nor1999]

Donald Norman; Affordance, Conventions, and Design; interactions, Vol. 6, No. 3, May 1999, pages 38-43. doi:10.1145/301153.301168.

[UXt2024]

UXtweak; Tree Testing; Visited 14 Mar 2024. https://uxtweak.com/treetest-tool.