Citation

A citation is a block of text that summarizes the source of an evidence card. Generally, a citation will also include a summary of the source's qualifications. By convention, every card in a brief will include a complete citation, so that debaters can easily read the citation even if they do not have the rest of the brief available.

For an example of a complete card with tagline and citation, see the article on "card".

Common styles
Opinions vary as to what elements are necessary in a citation, but most debaters include the date of the article, the title of the article, a summary of where it was published, the URL of the article (for internet sources), and a list of the article's authors and their credentials. Portions of the citation are often underlined to allow the reader to quickly summarize the source.

A typical citation for a journal article might look like the following:


 *  Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad (PhD, defense analyst at RAND, former US Ambassador to the United Nations), 1995 , "Losing the Moment? The United States and the World After the Cold War", The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2

A typical citation for an internet article might look like the following:


 *  Steven Pifer (director of the Brookings Arms Control Initiative and senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe, former ambassador to Ukraine) and Prof. Michael O'Hanlon (PhD from Princeton, senior fellow with the 21st Century Defense Initiative and director of research for the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University), "Nuclear Arms Control Opportunities: An Agenda for Obama’s Second Term", December 2012, Brookings Institution , http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2012/12/nuclear-arms-control-pifer-ohanlon, accessed January 2, 2013

Some debaters place an additional "source tag" at the beginning of the citation. Many researchers also place their initials at the end of the citation, so that the origin of each particular card can be tracked when cards by multiple authors are combined into a single brief:


 * Christopher Meisenkothen 1999 Christopher Meisenkothen [B.A., 1996, University of Connecticut; J.D., 1999, University of Connecticut School of Law.], Published in the Connecticut Journal of International Law [14 Conn. J. Int'l L. 631], Fall 1999, “NOTE: Subseabed Disposal of Nuclear Waste: An International Policy Perspective” [Accessed via Lexis-Nexis] [JS]