Resources > Citations and Bibliography

Scholars in nearly all academic fields are expected in their writing to build upon the work of others, and to explicitly acknowledge when they do so. In some fields, this is accomplished through footnotes. Others such as ethnomusicology, the field in which most scholars of Indonesian music work, use parenthetical references, and more specifically the “author-date” system. In this system, sources are cited in the text by including in parentheses only as much information as needed to unambiguously identify them. Usually, the author’s surname and the year of publication (hence “author-date”) suffices, plus page numbers when appropriate. More complete bibliographic information is provided in a bibliography, sometimes under the heading "References" or “References Cited."

For this course, we will follow the conventions used by the journal Ethnomusicology, which are based on The Chicago Manual of Style. The explanation below covers the basic use of this style for the most common types of sources. More thorough explanations are available through the Citation Management section of the Cornell University Library website.

Parenthetical References

When referencing a source as a whole, it usually suffices to include only the author surname and the date of publication. For example, I could refer here to this course’s required text (Brinner 2008).

It is equally common to reference particular passages in sources by including page numbers. This should be done not only for direct quotations, but also when paraphrasing. In Ethnomusicology, page numbers follow the year of publication, with a colon between the two. For example: (Brinner 2008:56-58).

Make sure to reference the actual author(s) of the text you are quoting or paraphrasing. In the case of chapters from edited books, it is the author(s) of the chapter, rather than the editor(s) of the books, who should be acknowledged.

The surname and/or the year of publication can be omitted if they are mentioned in the text itself; both can be omitted if the reference is to a quotation taken from another page of a source that was cited previously in the same paragraph, with no intervening citation.

In terms of placement, a parenthetical reference should go inside the unit it is a part of. This means that it comes after quotation marks, but before a period or other punctuation, if it follows a quote within a sentence. If it comes at the end of a block quote of one or more sentences (which should be set in a smaller font size and/or indented), it comes after the final period.

These points are illustrated in the following excerpt from a paper I wrote, “Indonesian Musik Kontemporer and the Question of ‘Western Influence'”:

Reflecting on her response to this charge, Diamond notes:

At first, I wanted to say that there is no Western influence. But of course European- American culture has influence in the world today, not just in art but in everything. And it would be difficult to argue its absence in Indonesia: the Dutch ruled there for 200 years, and ties with the U.S. are now very strong. (Diamond 1990:14-15)

Diamond is certainly right to point to Indonesia’s long colonial history and to the more recent cultural flows owing to what we now call globalization. Judith Becker was similarly right to counter the assumption, common when she was writing in 1972, that there is no Western influence in Javanese gamelan music. Arguing that “influence cannot be limited in interpretations to mean only simplistic adoption,” Becker points to “the impact of technology and Western concepts” (3). Along this line, Becker (1980), Sutton (1996), and Sumarsam (1995) have drawn attention to particular borrowings and impositions, some concrete like notation and electronic sound technologies, and others abstract, like the increase in individual creativity or the concept of high culture.

The first reference gives the source of a block quotation, and so is placed after the period of the last sentence, but within the block. The second reference comes after both the author and the date of publication were mentioned in the text, so they are omitted in the reference. The subsequent references are to entire sources in a list where the authors are named, so they include only the year.

Format for Bibliographies

The matter of proper formatting of bibliography can, for certain sources, be quite complicated. Most sources, however, follow basic patterns which are reasonably straightforward.

In the author-date system, to facilitate locating references, items are listed alphabetically by the surname of the author, and then by the year of publication. Items should include the following elements, in the following order:

Author name. Year of publication. Title. Publication and other information to locate the source.

Each element is followed by a period. Different types of sources are distinguished by the use of italic type and quotation marks for certain elements, and what kind of information is included to allow the reader to locate the source.

There are many small variations in formatting between different publishers and different journals, in terms of punctuation, abbreviations, etc. For consistency, please follow the examples here as closely as possible.

Books

For books, the title is italicized. (The translated title, if included, is not italicized, but placed in brackets.) The city and the name of the publisher are included, preceded by information on the edition if it is not a first edition, to help distinguish between editions or books with identical titles.

Brinner, Benjamin. 2008. Music in Central Java. New York: Oxford University Press.

See below for how to handle edited books and chapters from them.

Journal articles

For journal articles, the title of the article is in quotation marks, while the name of the journal is italicized. (The translated title, if included, is placed in brackets following the quoted title, and the period is placed after the bracket.) The journal name is followed by the number of the volume and/or the issue(s), depending on what numbering system the journal uses, and then the page numbers.

Perlman, Marc. 1999. "The Traditional Javanese Performing Arts in the Twilight of the
New Order: Two Letters from Solo." Indonesia 68:1-37. 

McGraw, Andrew Clay. 2009. "Radical Tradition: Balinese Musik
Kontemporer." Ethnomusicology 53(1):115-141.

Chapters from Edited Books

Chapters from edited books are more complicated, requiring acknowledgement of both the author(s) of the particular chapter, and the editor(s) responsible for overseeing the book as a whole. In most cases it is particular chapters that you will be referencing; they should thus be listed by the author(s) of the particular chapter, as you would an article in a journal. The formatting combines aspects of journal articles and books: the title of the chapter is in quotation marks; the title of the book is italicized, preceded by “In” and followed by “ed.”, the name of the editor(s), and the page numbers. The publication information is the same as a book.

Becker, Judith. 1979. "Time and tune in Java." In The Imagination of Reality, edited
by A. L. Becker and A. A. Yengoyan, 197-210. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

There may be instances where you reference the book as a whole, or an introduction writen by its editor(s); in such cases you should list the book as a whole, by the names of the editor(s), indicating that it is an edited book by putting “ed.” after their name(s).

Becker, A. L. and A. A. Yengoyan, ed. 1979. The Imagination of Reality. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

See Chapters in Edited Books for further explanation on why they are handled as they are, and how to search for them.

Dissertations and Theses

For a dissertations, the title is in quotation marks. The type of dissertation or theses and the university at which it was completed are included.

McGraw, Andrew C. 2004. "Musik Kontemporer: Experimental Music by Balinese
Composers." Ph.D. dissertation, Wesleyan University.

Links to Sources and Bibliographic Records

Feel free to include links to sources that are available online, or to records for them in the library catalog or other databases, as long as you are confident that these links will work beyond a specific context (such as on-campus, or a particular research session). As recommended by the Chicago Manual of Style, links should be the “final element” in a citation (see 14.6). Most importantly, links are “never sufficient” on their own; “the full facts of publication should always be recorded first” (see 14.7).

Corrections and Conformity

See also this guide to editing and correcting bibliographic entries.