Template:Citation/doc

The Citation template generates a citation for a book, periodical, contribution in a collective work, patent, or a web page. It determines the citation type by examining which parameters are used.

If invoked with the right parameters, this template produces output identical to that of the Cite templates, such as Cite book and Cite web. The default behavior sometimes differs from that of the Cite templates; for example, this template by default generates anchors for Harvard references whereas the Cite templates do not (although they can be made to do so), and this template by default uses commas to separate some fields that the Cite templates separate with periods (full stops).

The template should be inserted after punctuation, such as a period or comma.

All parameter names are lowercase.

Simple citation
This template gives the most commonly used attributes. You can copy the horizontal form or vertical form below and then add in extra attributes from the full list. Spacing and ordering is irrelevant.


 * last: The author's surname or last name. Don't use with author.
 * first: The author's first or given name(s).
 * year: Year of authorship or publication. Mandatory for use with links from Template:Harvard citation, unless date specifies both month and year.
 * title: Title of the work. Mandatory for web references.
 * publisher: The name of the publisher. Omit terms such as Publishers, Co., Inc., Ltd., etc., but retain the words Books or Press.
 * publication-place (or place): The city of publication. If more than one town/city is listed on the title page, give the first one or the location of the publisher's head office.
 * page: For use when one page is cited. Adds "p." before the page number. Do not use with pages.
 * url: An url of an online location where the item can be found. If the url includes double quotes, these must be encoded as "%22".
 * accessdate: Date when the url was accessed.

Full citation parameters
These can be used for all types of publication except patents. All are optional and indentation is used simply to group related items — these may be mutually exclusive where indicated. Some hyphenated names can also be placed without hyphens.


 * author (or author1): The author's name. It is preferable to use the last/first attributes below for single or multiple authors.
 * last (or last1): The author's surname or last name.
 * first (or first1): The author's first or given name(s).
 * author2, last2, first2, up to author9 etc.: can be used for multiple authors– up to 8 will be shown before et al. is displayed
 * author-link: Title of an existing Wikipedia article about the first author (author2-link etc can also be used).
 * author-separator: override the default semi-colon that separates authors.
 * author-name-separator: override the default comma that separates authors' last and first names.
 * author-mask: See, below.
 * display-authors: Truncate the list of authors at an arbitrary point with "et al". You should still include the first 9 authors to allow metadata to be generated. n.b. operates only when the authors are given using either several authorn, or several lastnfirstn pairs; does not affect the display of a list in either authors or coauthors.
 * lastauthoramp: If supplied, whether or not assigned a value, places an ampersand (&amp;) before the last name of final author, if more than one author is supplied. Recommended usage is lastauthoramp = yes.
 * coauthors: Names of additional author(s) can be given but author2 or last2, first2 is preferred.
 * editor: Name of editor, placed after date with  Not required for periodicals.
 * editor-link: link to article about the editor
 * others: Any other associated people, e.g., foreword, placed after editor.
 * publication-date (or date): Date of publication.
 * date: Date of authorship, if different from date of publication. If only date is used, it will be treated as the date of publication.
 * year: Year of authorship or publication. (Mandatory for use with links from Template:Harvard citation. In some situations, the template may be able to derive a year from the full date.)
 * month: Month of publication (ignored if the date field is used).
 * origyear: Year of first publication, if different.
 * title: Title of the book or article in a periodical. If the title includes [square brackets], these must be encoded as " " for "[" and " " for "]"
 * chapter or contribution: title of the chapter or part of a publication will be put in quotes.
 * chapter-url or contribution-url: use to add a link to the chapter or contribution title.
 * type: An optional field which can be used to provide additional information about a publication type. The content appears in parentheses following the title. If the publication is a thesis or dissertation, the type might be specified as, If the publication is an audiobook on compact disk, the type might be specified as.
 * journal or periodical or newspaper or magazine or work: Name of the journal or periodical.
 * edition: Number or name of the edition, if not the first; for example: edition = 2nd.
 * series: The book series of which this book is a part.
 * volume: The volume number of a multi-volume book.
 * issue: Issue number of a periodical.
 * publisher: The name of the publisher. Omit terms such as Publishers, Co., Inc., Ltd., etc., but retain the words Books or Press. Not needed if ISSN or DOI used.
 * publication-place (or place): The city of publication. If more than one town/city is listed on the title page, give the first one or the location of the publisher's head office. If the city is not well-known, you may add a county, region, or state. States in the U.S. are denoted by a two-letter code; for example:  (no period at the end). Where the publisher is a university and the place or location is included in the name of the university, do not use this parameter.
 * place or location: City in which the work was made, if different from the city of publication. If only place is used, it will be treated as the city of publication.
 * language: If not English. e.g., Finnish.
 * page: For use when one page is cited. Adds "p." before the page number. Do not use with pages.
 * pages: For use when multiple pages are cited. Adds "pp." before the page numbers. Do not use with page.
 * nopp: if set to any value,  do not generate 'p.' or 'pp.'. E.g.  . Using   has the same effect.
 * at: Position within the resource when page/pages is inappropriate or insufficient. This parameter is ignored if page/pages is specified. Examples of usage of at: para. 14 (when citing a source without page numbers), 02:56 (a film or audio timestamp), no. 456 (something in a numbered list), p. 6, col. 2 (for a page and a column because "column" is not a Citation template parameter), or sec. F pp. 4–6 (for a section and a page within the section, "section" not being a parameter).


 * separator: specifies the punctuation mark used to separate certain fields. This defaults to a comma; the Citation Style 1 family of templates uses a period.
 * laysummary: url of a lay summary of a technical article, which could be in a popular science magazine or newspaper.
 * laysource: Name of the source, e.g., The Guardian (UK newspaper) or New Scientist.
 * laydate: The date of publication or, where this is not available, date of retrieval of the lay summary.
 * postscript: Set terminal punctuation. Omit or leave blank to remove the trailing full stop. Punctuation specified by this parameter will appear within the cite span, and consequently before any icons added by metadata-using software, e.g., library browser plugins. Hence this parameter should be used instead of manually appending data to the citation. This parameter is ignored if quote is specified, when . is forced.
 * ref: An explicit ID for Harvard references; see Anchors for Harvard references

Anchored citations
This template can generate a citation that can be combined with shortened footnotes or parenthetical referencing. It does this by creating an HTML anchor containing an ID. The special parameter harv generates an ID suitable for Harvard referencing templates such as harv as specified in the next section; this is the default for the citation template. If an empty ref is given, no anchor is generated; this is the default for the Cite templates such as cite book and cite news. You can also specify the ID directly, using the ID parameter. For example, suppose an article's References section contains the markup: which generates the citation: Then, the markup " " generates a parenthetical reference "(Freud 1930)" containing a wikilink to the citation (try clicking on the wikilink).

Anchors for Harvard referencing templates
IDs compatible with Harvard referencing templates such as harv are computed from the last names of the authors and the year of the cited source. For example, the markup " " generates the Harvard reference "", which wikilinks to the citation whose markup and appearance are shown below: In this example the citation template defines, and the harv template uses, the HTML ID " ", composed by concatenating the string " " with the last names of the authors and the year. The harvid template can be used to generate such IDs, for example,  generates " ".

Related methods which leave only a number in the text are to use the harvnb template enclosed in the html code, or to use the sfn template alone. The example above would be  or   both of which generate a footnote, such as
 * 17.

The names of only the first four authors are used; other author names are not concatenated to the ID. If no author names are given, editor names are used instead. For patents, inventor names are used instead of authors or editors. If these names are not given, this template does not generate an anchor.

Last names are used, as specified by the parameters last1 (or last), last2, last3, and last4, and similarly for editor1-last etc. and for inventor1-last etc. If a full name is given but no last name is specified, this template falls back on the full name, but this usage is not recommended. For example, in " " no last name is given, so this citation cannot be combined with the Harvard reference " ". To make these citation and harv invocations compatible, either replace "Sigmund Freud" with "Sigmund Freud", or add "ref" to the citation invocation, or add the same ref parameter (say, "EgoId") to both the citation and the harv invocations.

Similarly, the year is used, as specified by year. If no year is given, this template attempts to derive the year from date (or, if no date is given, from publication-date) by applying the MediaWiki#time function. This heuristic works with many common date formats (American, International and ISO standard format YYYY-MM-DD as listed in WP:MOS), but may not work as expected with other formats, so when in doubt it may be safer to use year. Note that if only a year, say 2005, is known you must use 2005 rather than 2005.

IDs must be unique
Names, years, and hand-specified IDs must be chosen so that the IDs are unique within a page; otherwise the HTML will not conform to the W3C standards, and any references to the citations will not work reliably. For example, suppose a page contains the following two citations with harv-compatible IDs:

If these citations were altered to say "2008" rather than "2008a" and "2008b", the resulting page would not work, because the two different citations would both attempt to use the ID " ". To avoid this problem, distinguish the citations by appending suffixes to the years, e.g., "2008a" and "2008b", as was done above. Any Harvard references to these citations should use years with the same suffixes.

It is good practice to verify that a page does not contain duplicate IDs by using the W3C Markup Validation Service; see External links.

Tools
See Citing sources for a list of tools that can help create a reference in the "citation" format.