1

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

GUIDE TO USING AND REFERENCING

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES1

One of the most important skills you develop in History is learning how to identify, evaluate, use and
cite scholarly sources, both primary and secondary. In this guide we explain the principles of
referencing, and some principles for determining how reputable, scholarly and authoritative a source
may be – whether primary or secondary, written or visual, print or digital. Scholarly sources allow
you to assess and verify the status of the information and views they contain. Using such sources, and
citing them correctly, will in turn allow your reader to check the information and evidence on which
your own interpretation of a topic is based.

Table of Contents

Understanding  Primary  and  Secondary  Sources   2  

A  Note  on  Internet  Sources   2  
Footnotes   3  
Why  give  references?   3  
Footnotes  vs  Endnotes  and  In-­‐text  References   3  
What  should  be  footnoted?   3  
Preparing  footnotes   4  
How  to  footnote   4  
Essential  information  within  the  footnote   4  
Citation  style   4  
The  Chicago  referencing  style   4  
Footnoting  a  Book   5  
Footnoting  a  Chapter/Essay  in  an  Edited  Book   6  
Footnoting  a  Journal  Article   6  
Footnoting  an  Internet  Source   7  
Footnoting  a  Source  Read  in  Another  Source   9  
Footnoting  an  Edited  or  Translated  Primary  Source  With  Numbered  Sections   10  
Footnoting  Other  Primary  Sources  (archival  material,  newspapers,  visual  sources,  etc)   10  
Subsequent  citations  and  the  use  of  ibidem   11  
The  Bibliography   12  
Sample  bibliography   12  

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This guide has been updated in March-June 2016, by Dr Cindy McCreery, Dr Hélène
Sirantoine, Prof Penny Russell and Dr John Gagné.
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Understanding Primary and Secondary Sources

Primary sources are texts (documents, books, films, images or any other kind of evidence) that were
produced by someone who directly observed or participated in a specific era or event. Primary sources
may range from texts produced in the immediate context of an event (eg a travel diary; propaganda films
or newspaper reports in wartime) to accounts written after the event (eg a photo album assembled after
the trip is done; a memoir of war by a person who experienced it). For example, the October 1962
issues of the New York Times provide insight into the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the USA
and USSR to the brink of war, by showing what ordinary people were told about the crisis as it
unfolded. Victor Klemperer (1881–1960), I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (published
1998) discusses Klemperer’s first-hand experience of life in Nazi Germany (1933–45). The lapse of
time before Klemperer’s was published is significant in itself. When using a primary source you
should ask not only when, how and why it was originally produced, but also when, how, why and
how widely it was disseminated.

Secondary sources comprise the many texts that are produced after and outside the context of the
period or event they describe. They are not a direct source of evidence – that is, they are written not
by participants in the events described, but by later scholars and others who seek to make sense of
those events. Secondary sources are not all created equal, but may range from simple overviews in
encyclopaedias (including Wikipedia), almanacs and school texts, through popular narratives or
polemical rants to books, journal articles and websites created by recognised scholars and published by
scholarly presses, universities and research institutions. Your task is to recognise the differences between
such sources, and to be discriminating in the ways that you make use of them. This does not mean you
should never again read a Wikipedia page: an encyclopaedic overview may be exactly what you need to
read first, if only to orient yourself in relation to a plethora of detached pieces of information. It does mean
that you shouldn’t cite the Wikipedia page as a reference in your essay: because by the time you submit
your work for assessment, you should have moved well past that initial moment of confusion and
discovery, and have found better, more reliable and more scholarly sources from which to draw your
evidence and on which to build your arguments. High quality secondary sources will usually have a clearly
identifiable author; they will appear in books published by university presses (eg Harvard University Press;
Melbourne University Press) or in journals hosted by universities and managed by academic editors (eg
American Historical Review or History Workshop Journal); and they will use scholarly referencing –
footnotes or endnotes, bibliographies and the like – to show exactly what evidence and arguments have
informed their own conclusions. Scholarly journal articles are ‘peer-reviewed’, i.e. rigorously vetted by
other experts in this field, usually in a process of ‘double-blind review, where the whole process is
carried out with anonymity. (Hint: most scholarly journals mention this peer review process on the
first page/s or inside front cover of each volume.) Your ability to identify, understand, and critically
engage with scholarly sources of this kind is a key measure of your own training as a scholar.

A Note on Internet Sources

In the past decade there has been a virtual explosion of historical sources on the internet – both
primary and secondary. Much of this material is incredibly useful for students, bringing rich archival
sources from all around the world into your reach, and providing access from your desk or phone to
the most outstanding scholarly sources on your topic. Much of it is rubbish. So how do you tell the
difference?

An article in the Journal of American History is a scholarly source for that reason; whether you
encounter it in hard copy in the library, or online via J-STOR makes no difference to its scholarly
status. The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is quite another matter. Anyone can contribute to it, and
the content is not reviewed by experts. Thus, a Wikipedia entry is not a scholarly source (and thus not
an acceptable source for a university essay) because it has not been subjected to rigorous expert
assessment before being made available online.

Scholarly (and thus acceptable) internet sources include primary source material that has been placed
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on the web by a recognised academic, government or other institution (such as the Internet Modern
History Source Book, which is hosted by Fordham University in the USA) as well as online
collections of primary sources (eg ECCO) and, of course, internet sources recommended by your unit
of study co-ordinator. Remember that when you do cite an internet source, you must provide
sufficient details so that your reader can find the source easily. If you are not able to find this
information, this is probably a fair indication that it is not a scholarly source.

Some scholarly journals are available to you only online, through databases such as J-STOR. Of
course, these are also legitimate sources. When citing articles from online databases, do not quote the
URL. Cite the article as if you had used the print version.

Footnotes

Why give references?

References show the reader where you found the ideas and evidence that shaped your analysis.
Accurate references enable the reader to go back and check the exact sources and the evidence that
led you to your conclusions. In that sense, the references—the bare citations themselves— are a key
part of your argument. Essays without references, or with inadequate ones, do not meet the basic
requirements of scholarship and will not receive a passing grade.

Footnotes vs Endnotes and In-text References

There are three main academic referencing systems: footnotes, endnotes and in-text references. Essays
submitted to the Department of History should always use footnotes. The in-text referencing system,
sometimes known as the Harvard system, is used mainly in the social sciences. It takes the form
‘Brown argues that the sky is blue (Brown, 2001: 245)’. In historical scholarship, where sources are
often complex (eg a series of documents in a unique archival collection), in-text referencing can be
difficult to use, clumsy and awkward. For this reason, footnotes are the preferred form of referencing
in History. (You’ll notice that book publishers tend to prefer endnotes, which place the references at
the end of the document, keeping the pages of text free from clutter. But journal editors usually
prefer footnotes – and so do we, because they enable us see at a glance how you are backing up your
arguments.)

Footnotes, which place the references at the bottom of the page, should always be used in essays
submitted to the Department of History. A footnote number is inserted in the text at the end of the
sentence that needs a source citation, and the information on that source is placed at the bottom of the
page, as illustrated below.

What should be footnoted?

In general, the following information should be footnoted. If you are unsure, then please ask your
tutor, lecturer or seminar co-ordinator for further guidance:

• Facts that are not widely known. For example, the statement that the First World War began
in August 1914 needs no footnote, BUT the statement that Corporal Bill Smith enlisted in
Melbourne on 8 July 1915 does need a footnote. If you include information that is not widely
known in your essay, then you MUST footnote it.
• Statistics always need a footnote. A footnote needs to be placed at the end of the sentence so
that your reader can verify the statistic you have quoted. For example, you might write:
‘Although they were among the most powerful members of eighteenth-century French
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society, the aristocracy represented only 1% of the total population’.2

Footnote number. See bottom of this page for what the

text of a footnote looks like.

• Ideas or arguments that are not your own need a footnote, even if you have summarised or
paraphrased them in your own words.
• Direct quotations always need a footnote.

Preparing footnotes
When preparing footnotes, please remember:

• Use ‘footnotes’ not ‘endnotes’ when creating your references.

• Footnotes are placed at the bottom of each relevant page of your essay.
• The footnote number normally goes at the end of the sentence (see next point).
• There should not usually be more than one footnote for any given sentence. You can put
multiple references into the same footnote.
• Do not stack up your footnote numbers (eg 17 18).
• Footnotes are numbered consecutively from the beginning to the end of the essay.
• Footnotes are single-spaced and separated from each other by a single line.
• Each footnote is a new sentence and therefore begins with a capital letter.
• Each footnote ends with a full stop.

How to footnote
To create a footnote in Microsoft Word, go to the Insert menu and choose Footnote (or, if you are
using a PC, Reference and then Footnote). Each footnote, in the text and at the bottom of the page, is
numbered automatically. All you do is enter the details of your source.

Essential information within the footnote

You must provide the following information within footnotes: name of the author; title of the source;
name of the city and publisher of the source; the date of publication; and the page number(s) you
used. The full information is given in the first citation, and a shorter version is given in subsequent
citations. The format for the footnote information varies according to the type of source used; for
example, book, journal article, book chapter/essay in an edited book, or website.

Citation style

The Chicago referencing style

The citation style in use for History written assessments is The Chicago manual of style, 16th ed.
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). Where possible use Australian spelling and
punctuation as given in the Macquarie Concise Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Sydney: Macquarie Library,
1998).

Detailed examples of how to cite and footnote references are given on the online Chicago-Style

2
George Butler, The French Aristocracy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 25.
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Citation Quick Guide: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

Note that you can access the entire Chicago manual of style via the university Library subscription:
http://opac.library.usyd.edu.au:80/record=b5030247~S4

In the following pages you will find examples of how to cite the most common kinds of sources used
in History assessments.

Footnoting a Book
For example:

Author’s given name(s)

and/or initials as stated
on the title page.
Title of book,
including subtitle, in
Author’s family
italics.
name.

2
Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation,
1500-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 65.

Footnotes are single-

spaced and end with a
Put a colon ‘:’ between
full stop.
the city of publication
and the publishing Relevant page
Publication details in number(s). If you cite
parentheses, including city of company.
from one
publication: publishing house, write ‘65’. If you cite
and year of publication. The consecutive page
place of publication is always numbers, write ‘65-69’.
the city, not the state or the
country.

Subsequent citation of this source:

Shortened version of
book title to indicate
Author’s family
subject matter.
name only.

3
Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, 68.

No publication details are

required, as this is a subsequent
citation.
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Footnoting a Chapter/Essay in an Edited Book

For example:
Use single quotation marks
Use double quotation for any quotation that is used
marks around the title of in the title of the Full title of essay/chapter in
the essay/chapter. essay/chapter. Note the single quotation marks,
comma outside of the NOT ITALICS.
quotation marks, in Australian
English.
4
Frances Clarke, “‘Honorable Scars’: Northern Amputees and the Meaning of Civil War Injuries”, in
Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences and Postwar Adjustments, ed.
Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 361-62.

Name(s) of the editor(s) of

the book, introduced by
‘ed.’. Details of the edited book
introduced by ‘in’.

Subsequent citation of this source:

Shortened version of essay/chapter

title— enough to indicate the
subject matter—in single quotation
marks.

5
Clarke, “Northern Amputees”, 363.

Footnoting a Journal Article

For example:

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Judith Keene, “‘The Word Makes the Man’: A Catalan Anarchist Autodidact in the Australian
Bush”, Australian Journal of Politics and History 47, no. 3 (September 2001): 311-15.

Volume and issue

Title of journal in italics. numbers.
Relevant page
Month/year in number(s) introduced
parentheses. by a colon ‘:’.
Subsequent citation of this source:

The title of the article is shortened

to indicate the subject matter.

7
Keene, “A Catalan Anarchist Autodidact”, 313.
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Footnoting an Internet Source

The Internet is extensive, and there are many resources, scholarly as well as unscholarly, available.
Choose only scholarly sources for your research. The Chicago Manual of Style provides some
information about how to cite the Internet. Here is guidance which will help ensure that you are
citing your Internet Sources in the best possible way. For citation purposes, you should also make a
distinction between:

A. Websites that provide the reproduction of a source created previously.

1. Some websites/databases provide digitized versions of previously printed texts: eg
the Eighteenth Century Collections Online, for 18th c. printed texts.
! Follow the website’s guidelines on how to cite the source (usually given at
the bottom of the page).
! If there are no citation guidelines, indicate first the referencing details of the
original work, followed by the name of the website, its creation/updating
date if provided, its <URL> (website address; this must be accurate and
presented within two enclosures as shown) OR the identification number
within the database, and the date you viewed the source.

Data relative to the

original printed text.

Digitized version of
the originally printed
text.

Citation guidelines.

8
Jonathan Swift, Travels into several remote nations of the world. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver.
First a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, vol. 1 (London, 1774). First published 1726-27.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale.
<http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=E
CCO&userGroupName=usyd&tabID=T001&docId=CB3329142057&type=multipage&contentSet=
ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE>. Accessed 31 May 2016.

OR
8
Jonathan Swift, Travels into several remote nations of the world. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver.
First a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, vol. 1 (London, 1774). First published 1726-27.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale (CB3329142057). Accessed 31 May 2016.
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2. Other websites provide only the encoded text of previous publications: eg the
Gutenberg Project.
! Indicate first the referencing details of the original work, as indicated on the
website, followed by the name of the website, its creation/updating date if
provided, its <URL> (website address; this must be accurate and presented
within two enclosures as shown), and the date you viewed the source.

9
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (London, George Bell
and Sons, 1892). First published 1726-27. Gutenberg Project. <
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm>. Accessed 31 May 2016.

B. Websites that are sources themselves (eg the website of a Museum exhibition).
o Make sure first that the Internet source you intend to cite is scholarly. A scholarly
source will clearly indicate who created the webpage or who is responsible for its
contents (eg a university, a museum, an educational institutions are usually reputable
hosts)
o Be very wary of collaborative wikis (where authorship is unclear and the information
is transient and continually shifting), individual blogs, websites hosted by political
action groups or religious organisations.
o If you are not certain, please check with your UoS coordinator or tutor.
o Once you have determined that your Internet source is scholarly, indicate in your
citations:
1. The title of the webpage, in quotation marks (eg the title of an online exhibition
within a museum website).
2. The full name of the author(s). This can be the name of an individual, eg Adam
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Smith, or an institution, eg American Museum of the Moving Image.

3. Date of the webpage creation and/or updating.
4. <The Uniform Resource Locator (URL)> (website address). This must be
accurate and presented within two enclosures as shown.
5. The date you viewed the source (this is important because websites change
frequently).

10
“On Their Own: Britain’s Child Migrants”, collaborative museum exhibition between Australian
National Maritime Museum and National Museums Liverpool, 2010. <www.anmm.gov.au/whats-
on/exhibitions/past/on-their-own>. Accessed 3 June 2016.

Footnoting a Source Read in Another Source

If you want to cite a source (Source A) that is quoted and/or discussed in another source (Source B),
make sure you indicate in your footnote that you read Source A in Source B. The example given
below indicates that you have read Bakunin (Source A) in McKercher’s book (Source B). If you cite
only Source A, the reader will assume that you read Bakunin directly—in French!

Details of Source A: full Details of Source B in

name of original author, which you have read
Title of original work and Source A, introduced by
date of publication. ‘quoted in’.

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Michael Bakunin, Pensées Politiques (1868) quoted in William R. McKercher, Libertarian
Thought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Freedom, Equality and Authority (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1987), 62.
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Footnoting an Edited or Translated Primary Source With Numbered Sections

Historians—especially those who work on premodern topics—often find themselves working with
primary sources, or translations of primary sources, that are broken up into numbered books or
sections. You can make life easier for your reader by providing not only the standard information
specified above, but also the number of the book and/or section concerned. A reader who has a
different edition / translation, with different pagination, will then still be able to trace the reference
without difficulty. Place the book / section numbers after the title:

12
Ralph Glaber, Histories, 3.18, ed. Neithard Bulst, trans. John France and Paul Reynolds (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), 125.

An alternative, when referring to a work whose scriptural status is common knowledge, is not to state
the author at all: eg ‘Exodus, 22.9’ is sufficient to refer to the Bible’s Book of Exodus.

Footnoting Other Primary Sources (archival material, newspapers, visual sources, etc)
As you progress in your study of history, you may find yourself using primary sources that are not
covered by the examples above. The key point to remember is that the purpose of footnotes is to tell
the reader (1) what the source is, and (2) where it can be found. That becomes particularly important
where only one copy of the source exists, as with archival sources. Some types of source that
historians regularly use are: newspapers and magazines, pamphlets and other 'ephemera', letters and
diaries, government and other archives, films, paintings, artefacts and interviews. All need to be cited
in footnotes if you refer to them in an essay.

For example, for a letter conserved in archives:

13
Letter from J. K. Moir to Frank Clune, 28 November 1938, Clune Papers, Folder 57, Box 10,
MS4951, National Library of Australia.

For newspaper articles, provide the title (if any) of the newspaper article, the title of the newspaper,
date of publication, followed (if appropriate) by details of the source where you viewed the article.
Here is an example of an Australian colonial newspaper article viewed on the National Library of
Australia’s website Trove:
14
“Shipping Intelligence”, Tasmanian Morning Herald, 13 July, 1866, 2. Trove.
<http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article169046243>. Accessed 31 May 2016.
 11

For visual sources such as paintings, indicate the artist’s name, title of the work, date of creation,
and current location, followed by the references of the source where you viewed the image:

1. If it is on a website: the name of the website, its creation/updating date if provided, its
<URL> (website address; this must be accurate and presented within two enclosures as
shown), and the date you viewed the source.
15
Édouard Manet, The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil, 1874, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, on Wikimedia Commons,
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Édouard_Manet_--
The_Monet_Family_in_Their_Garden_at_Argenteuil.jpg>, accessed 31 May 2016.

2. If it is in a printed source: see details of the publication as indicated above (book, journal
article, etc)
16
Joshua Reynolds, Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, 1789, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, in
Nicholas Penny, ed., Reynolds (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1986), 324.

Subsequent citations and the use of ibidem

The ‘short title’ system is the department’s preferred usage for subsequent citations. It is, however,
acceptable to use ‘Ibid.’ (with no quotation marks and no italics), as long as you use it correctly and
appropriately. ‘Ibid.’ is short for the Latin word ibidem, which means ‘the same.’ When you use
‘Ibid.’ in a footnote, you are telling the reader that the reference is identical to that in the footnote
immediately preceding it. Thus if you cite McKenzie Imperial Underworld, p. 6 in note 8, and again in
note 9, note 9 can simply read ‘Ibid.’. If your second citation is from p. 12 of the same work, note 9
can simply read ‘Ibid., p. 12.’. You cannot use ‘Ibid.’ if you have cited more than one source in the
preceding note.
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The Bibliography
You must include a bibliography for every essay that you submit to the History department. A
bibliography is a list of sources you have used to prepare your essay. It is arranged in alphabetical
order of the authors’ family names (eg ‘Aldrich…, Hillard…, Moses…, Russell…’). The
bibliography should appear at the end of your essay on a separate page.

Separate the primary and secondary sources in your bibliography. If you have used only one type of
source (eg only secondary sources), put all of them under the heading Bibliography.

Sample bibliography
Bibliographic entries are
double-spaced. The
Note that in the second and subsequent
bibliography the Primary sources lines are indented.
author’s family name
comes before his/her
given name. A comma
Manet, Édouard. The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil, 1874.
is inserted between the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. On Wikimedia Commons,
two parts of the name.
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Édouard_Manet_--
The_Monet_Family_in_Their_Garden_at_Argenteuil.jpg>. Accessed 31 May
2016.

Ralph Glaber. Histories. Edited by Neithard Bulst, translated by John France and Paul
Reynolds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. In the bibliography, the author’s
name, title, and editor/translator
details are separated by a full stop
‘.’. Publications details are not in
parenthesis anymore.
Secondary sources

The mention ‘edited

Clarke, Frances. “‘Honorable Scars’: Northern Amputees and the Meaning of Civil by’ is developed (NOT
War Injuries”. In Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime ‘ed.’)
Page numbers of the
entire chapter/article Experiences and Postwar Adjustments, edited by Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M.
are required.
Miller, 361-393. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.

Fitzmaurice, Andrew. Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English

Colonisation, 1500-1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Keene, Judith. “‘The Word Makes the Man’: A Catalan Anarchist Autodidact in the
Australian Bush”. Australian Journal of Politics and History 47, no. 3 (September
2001): 311-29.