Art history papers must be regularly cited. This not only helps you avoid being accused of plagiarism, but also strengthens your argument. When you cite authoritative sources, their credibility increases your own. Citations also help display for your professor how much research you did, and the more, the merrier, here. I have often had students flunk for not having enough (or any) citations, but I have never flunked a student for having too many citations!
There are many citation formats, but in art history, footnotes in the Chicago style are the standard. This is not hard, but you do need to pay attention to the details to get it right. There is little excuse for not having correct citations, so pay attention carefully to the Art History Rules for Citations, and copy these models!
Books:
Charles Dodwell, The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1974), 12.
Article:
Jeffrey Cohen, “In a Time of Monsters,” Art Bulletin, 25:1 (1998), 3.
Article in a Collection of Essays
Greta Austin, “Marvelous Peoples or Marvelous Races? Race and Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East,” in Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, ed. Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger (Kalamzoo: Western Michigan University, 2002), 27.
Web Page:
Michele Brown, “Catalogue Entry for The Hexateuch,” The British Library Web Catalogue (2001) <http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts//HITS0001.ASP?VPath=html/65005.htm&Search=Cott.+Claud.+B.+iv.&Highlight=F> accessed January 12, 2003.
These are based on the Chicago Manual of Style. See here for their helpful Quick Citation Guide, which has many more formats (like books with two authors, articles in collections of essays, etc.). Be sure to note that you want the “N” examples for footnotes and the “B” examples for bibliographies and works cited lists.
The two most important aspects of citation are consistency and traceability. Can your reader easily find the text you are citing? Have you given all the necessary information?
The Citation Machine claims to be able to generate these formats for you, but watch out -- I have found it to be pretty unreliable, and anyway, it only generates bibliography citation formats, which are not the same as footnote citation format. Only use it with caution.
See here for an example of how they should look on your page.
HOW TO MAKE FOOTNOTES IN MS WORD:
Click Insert>Footnote (or Reference, depending on version)>Ok.
This will automatically place the superscript number in your text, and the corresponding reference at the base of the page. For lots more detail, see here.
