the creator of a work from preventing those who came after from using prior works for the advancement of knowledge.

To satisfy both issues, the law has worked out the fair use doctrine. This doctrine provides that use of a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.

However, every writer must acknowledge his/her indebtedness for material when she quotes directly from a work, paraphrases or summarizes someone’s words, or appropriates an idea that is not common knowledge. If you do not give credit, you plagiarize, which is a serious breach of the rules governing academic work.

Quotations and Footnotes

If you are in doubt as to whether or not to give credit, give credit. Any idea you get from a research book must be acknowledged. However, definitions in a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a textbook, or information communicated by a professor in a class, can be considered common knowledge, and so there is no need to acknowledge this source.

External sources can be integrated into your paper through direct quotations, summaries, or descriptions.

Distinguish between short and long quotations. Short quotations (fewer than five lines) are enclosed in quotation marks and run into the text. Long quotations (longer than five lines) are set off from the text by double spaces before and after the quotation, single spaces for the quotation, and indenting it five spaces from the left margin. You may identify the author of the quotation, either before or after it. In general, when mentioning people in a paper, one should include first and last names in the first instance, and thereafter only the last name. Quotations should be smoothly integrated into the text of your paper. In most cases, the proper introduction of a quote can accomplish this.

Acknowledgement of a source is done through foot- (or end-) notes. Number these notes consecutively using a raised numeral (no periods or parentheses) after the quotation. Usually, the number goes after the period point of the sentence in which the quotation is cited. The text of the footnote goes to the bottom of the page, three lines after the text (Endnotes follow the text of the paper). First, indent five spaces, then write the raised numeral, skip one space and type the text of the footnote.

Types of Footnotes

In architectural history, the citation norm is the one proposed by the Chicago Manual of Style. Here is how one cites books and articles correctly:

First reference to a book:

1 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1992), p. 3.

Second reference to an already cited book:

2 Frampton, Modern Architecture, p. 4. First reference to an article:

3 Joseph Siry, “Adler and Sullivan’s Guaranty Building in Buffalo,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55 (March 1996):6-37.

Second reference to an already cited article:

4 Siry, “Guaranty Building,” p. 30.

Chicago Style has also introduced a second method of citation. You provide a bibliography at the end of the paper, and instead of footnote numbers, you add the shortened reference consisting of last name of author, year of publication, and page number in parenthesis after the quote: (Morgenthaler, 2011, 193).