I do understand that citations should be as precise as possible (including e.g. edition of a book or a page number), so that ideally, the reader can find the information exactly as I found it when writing.
I also understand that the problem with citing webpages is that they can change. But how does including the date when I accessed the page help anything? The reader still won't be able to read the same version I did (unless the page includes history, which is very rare). And comparing the accessed date with the current date isn't very helpful either: some webpages change multiple times per day, some aren't modified for years.
Or is the accessed date useful for some other purpose?
Answer
I am not aware of any published accounts of how style rules are developed. If you really want to know why a particular rule was developed, you need to asked them directly. That said, there are a number of different styles for dealing with electronic materials and these styles are changing:
- MLA: You always need the date of access for electronic resources.
- APA: You rarely use the date of retrieval, although in previous versions (APA 5) you always did
- CMS: You never need the date of access/retrieval. I am not sure if you ever did in earlier versions.
No comments:
Post a Comment