Help:Citations
Contents
Providing Citations
Providing proper citations or references for content on Open Energy Information is fundamental to the core content policies of the site. All sources must be verifiable, all articles are encouraged to have at least one citation.
Auto-Generated Citations from an OpenEI Reference
If you use OpenEI's reference form to add a reference, OpenEI will automatically assemble the proper MLA citation for your reference. This citation is then attributed semantically to the reference as the value of the Citation property. You can access this property from other pages to easily display the citation elsewhere in the wiki using the Cite template. For example, to cite U.S. Renewable Energy Technical Potentials: A GIS-Based Analysis in this page, just add the following code:
{{Cite|Billy's paper|U.S. Renewable Energy Technical Potentials: A GIS-Based Analysis}}
...which would generate a clickable footnote carrot ([1]) and add the following citation to the <references/> section at the bottom of the page:
Anthony Lopez, Billy Roberts, Donna Heimiller, Nate Blair, Gian Porro (National Renewable Energy Laboratory). 2012. U.S. Renewable Energy Technical Potentials: A GIS-Based Analysis. Golden, Colorado: National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Report No.: NREL/TP-6A20-51946. Contract No.: DE-AC36-08GO28308.
The above citation can also be added directly to a page without invoking the <references/> mechanism by querying the reference page directly with:
{{#show: U.S. Renewable Energy Technical Potentials: A GIS-Based Analysis|?Citation}}
Entering References in a Form
When contributing a new page (or editing an existing page) that uses a form, you are asked to provide references for the information in the form. There are two primary methods for doing this: Entering references for the entire page, and entering references for individual values in the form.
Entering References for the Entire Page
Simply fill in the Title and URL for the reference. The reference is automatically appended to the page when you save the page. You can enter multiple references by choosing "Add a reference". Each reference fields can be updated in the form and these changes are submitted when you save the page. You can also remove references by choosing the "X".
For each of the fields, here is a brief description:
- Title - The title of the web page being referenced.
- URL - The url of the web page being referenced. (Include full url, e.g. http://site.com)
- Name- (Optional) The name to give the reference wikitext tag. Can be used for future references within the wiki article.
In some cases, when editing an existing page, the reference helper may not be able to parse the references and will present a default text area instead. In this case you will have to manually enter your references using the advanced syntax described below (#Entering References in Wikitext). You can always choose to manually enter you references simply by clicking on "Use advanced syntax".
Entering References for Individual Values
Note: The form must support this option by including the ShowRefFieldsButton widget and specifying a ReferenceForValue for at least one of the fields in the form.
Reference fields are hidden by default. To specify a reference for an individual form field, first locate and click the Show Reference Fields button, typically found near the top of the form. Reference fields (in gray_ will appear below each of the form fields that support value-specific references:
Start typing and the reference field will autocomplete on the existing list of OpenEI references. If your reference is not in the list, you can enter the title of it now and add the reference later by clicking the red link generated after you save the form. Adding a reference to the library is easy, and can be a time saver if you plan to cite the same reference for a number of values on a page, a number of different pages, or both.
Entering References in Wikitext
When entering references in the main article content of a page, you have to use the advanced syntax to manually specify the reference details.
Online Sources
Since Open Energy Information is an online platform, many of the citations will be for online sources and the {{cite web}} template can be used.
For example:
* {{cite web|title=About NREL|url=http://www.nrel.gov/about/}}
Will render like so.
OpenEI's Reference Library will also allow the creation of online references. Add a new reference.
Other Forms of Citation
For other forms for citation you are encouraged to use OpenEI's Reference Library. Adding a reference to the library is as easy as filling out the Reference form. The resulting reference will even generate the proper MLA citation. If you have already added a reference to the library, citing it is easy! You can site it using the handy Cite template. For example, to cite a reference named Awesome Research Paper as the source for the value of FigureA, you would add the following to your page:
{{Cite|FigureA|Awesome Research Paper}}
You can use this template to cite more than one reference for a single value by listing them semicolon delimited, for example:
{{Cite|FigureA|Awesome Research Paper; Another Paper}}
In both examples, if Awesome Research Paper exists, the template will return the appropriate MLA citation. If it doesn't exist, the template will return a red link. Clicking the link will take you to the appropriate form to add the reference!
The Cite template can also be used in conjunction with a form using the ReferenceForValue template to automatically display references for individual values in a form, as seen above. For an example of this in use, please see the Sample Form. The Cite template automatically generates the <ref> tag discussed below, but not the <references/> tag, which needs to be added to your page for the references to display properly.
Specifying References with the <ref> Tag
To make a reference to a particular citation, you use the <ref> tag in line with their content. The tag will insert a superscript to a footnote that is automatically numbered appropriately and links to a References section at the end of the document. The footnote numbers are automatically calculated for each <ref> tag included in the article.
The <references> tag is then included in a section at the bottom of the document and all the reference content is automatically listed there.
The <ref> and <references> tag
Below is an example of how the <ref> and <references> tags can be used with the {{cite web}} template.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is based in Golden, Colorado.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://nrel.gov/about|title=About NREL}}</ref>
The U.S. Department of Energy is based in Washington, DC.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://energy.gov/about|title=About DOE}}</ref>
==References==
<references/>
Mulitple uses of the same footnote
When you are making use of a footnote multiple times within the same document, it would be useful to not have to repeatedly enter the reference tag and citation of that footnote. In this case, the name attribute of the <ref> tag can be used to give the reference a unique name that can then be later referenced elsewhere in the document. A named reference is specified like so, <ref name="unique"> and can then later be referred to by specifying <ref name="unique"/> later in the document.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is based in Golden, Colorado.<ref name="about-nrel">{{cite web|url=http://nrel.gov/about|title=About NREL}}</ref>
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.<ref name="about-nrel/>
==References==
<references/>
Separating references from text
Including all references in line with the content of the article can make it difficult to edit the article content. For this reason wikitext supports including all of the named references within the <references> tag at the bottom of the article.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is based in Golden, Colorado.<ref name="about-nrel"/>
The U.S. Department of Energy is based in Washington, DC.<ref name="about-doe"/>
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.<ref name="about-nrel/>
==References==
<references>
<ref name="about-nrel">{{cite web|url=http://nrel.gov/about|title=About NREL}}</ref>
<ref name="about-doe">{{cite web|url=http://energy.gov/about|title=About DOE}}</ref>
</references>
For more information about using specifying references, please see the Mediawiki documentation.[1]