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Stamps Virtual Theological Library: Citation Help

by Steve Jung and Sharon Ralston; exp., rev. and maintained by S. Ralston

Introduction and a Guiding Principle for Scanned PDF Content

Please see the tabbed sub-pages for Style Guides for  SBL, MLA, APA, APA adapted for Biblical Studies, and Turabian.

How should one deal with scanned content from print books? 

Every style manual is very exacting in providing prescribed principles and samples to follow for citing different kinds of publications -- whether that style be CMS, Turabian, MLA, APA or SBL.  This guide  provides samples for those different kinds of resources commonly encountered when writing research papers for biblical studies and theology,  supplying a page for each of those style manuals for those kinds of resources  for print and  electronic forms of publication.  

Regardless of the particulars of any one  style manual, and the various complexities of a particular resource (ie, mulltivolume work? two editors? a translator?),  a writer is expected to cite each resource used in the form it was published and likewise used (ie, a print book, an ebook, a PDF of an article in a database, a digitalized work in a database that was originally a print resource and may or may not have retained pagination, an entry in a multivolume dictionary of a print work that is part of a software collection and so on!)   These are different kinds of publications.  So consult your style manual for those different types of works and borrow from other samples that your primary sample model does not include and employ the closest sample when one does not exist for a kind of work you used in this discipline.   There are so many details in this task of citation!

But what about scanned content on our guide or sometimes emailed to you?  One  simple word of guidance regarding citing content consulted that is delivered to you as scanned content is this:  The PDFs are simply a delivery service, not a publication form.  It is our suggestion that you cite the work as though you consulted the content in its original (and more permanent) publication form from which it was scanned; in most cases this is a print publication, but adjust as necessary.