Arts Administration

Writing a research paper means documenting, or "citing," the sources of the information you use. How do you cite your sources? Every time you quote from or mention another person's writing or research in your own paper, you also mention the source of that work in a little aside called an "annotation." At the end of your paper, you include a list called a bibliography of all the sources you used throughout.

There are many different ways to annotate or call out sources in your paper, and many different ways to format the bibliography. These are called citation styles, and the professor who assigns a paper (or the publisher of a paper if it is being written for publication) tells writers which style they should use for any particular paper. Two common styles used when writing about the arts are Chicago (the Chicago Manual of Style) and MLA (the MLA Handbook).

Online access to the full text of The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. (UK subscription limited to 25 simultaneous users.)

To see a print copy of the manual in the library:

Here is a short, authoritative guide to image citation from Colgate University:

Readers need to understand the images you include in your paper to illustrate you points, especially where the images came from. Art historians usually label their illustrations sequentially (Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3...) and then in the caption for each image, they provide information about the work illustrated itself, and about the original source of the image (where/by who the image was created and published). Here is an example for an image of a Playbill theatre program:

Figure 1: "Legally Blonde the Musical" Playbill program, 2007. Commercially printed on paper, 4"x6". Image from playbill.com

And here is an example of a caption for an image of one of your works:

Figure 2: Artist's Name, Title of Your Work, date. [information about medium and size]. Image provided by the author.

For information about what to include in your captions for images of works of visual art, I also like this guide from Colgate University:

To help you keep track of the citations you find for articles, books, and images while you're researching, and to help you integrate the citations into your papers, footnotes, and bibliographies while you're writing, it can be helpful to use a citation management tools such as EndNote or Zotero.

Using a citation management tool (also called a bibliographic management tool) allows you to save your source citations for later, which is especially valuable for longer papers, like theses and dissertations, and for topics you return to over time.

EndNote is a subscription software program designed to store and manipulate bibliographic information (your citations). It is one of the one of the more powerful and popular citation management tools. It is not freely available for everyone, but as a UK student or staff or faculty member, you can download and use EndNote as part of the university's subscription.

The Robert E. Hemenway Writing Center at the the University of Kentucky offers free and friendly help to all UK students, faculty, and staff. Graduate student consultants and undergraduate consultants assist with the process of composing and communicating in writing, speaking, and multimedia projects across the curriculum, at every stage of the composing and communicating process.

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The Writing Center is located in the W. T. Young Library Hub in room B108B.