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Sources generally
Anything that cannot be considered “common knowledge” concerning the topic about which you are writing should be documented. Please cite your sources!
If sources are missing, we'll ask you to supply them. Note, however, that you don't need to cite sources for uncontested facts that can easily be established via online resources such as Wikipedia.
Any personal communication used by the author (personal interviews, letters, emails, telephone conversations etc.) must have the interviewee’s knowledge/permission and a reference must be provided.
Sources: Wikipedia
Wikipedia should not normally be cited as the main source for information that is key to any point that you are making. But it is acceptable to rely on Wikipedia articles
- where they provide interesting incidental or contextual information summarised from many sources that would be unnecessarily time-consuming to verify and cite individually
- where they contain information that seems only to be available through Wikipedia
- where the very point of interest is the way a subject is treated by Wikipedia.
Copyrighted material: permissions
Note that where you are incorporating material that is copyright to others it is necessary to provide a reference to the source. But this doesn't mean you need to obtain permission to use it: the key exception is summarised in an EU website page Questions and Answers – New EU copyright rules:
...everywhere in Europe the use of existing works for purposes of quotation, criticism, review, caricature as well as parody are explicitly allowed.
This would apply to the most common reasons for citing copyrighted text in Poise. However, note that this does not necessarily apply to visual artwork (photos, illustrations), statistical tables, song lyrics, poetry, and the like.
If permissions are necessary, we would expect you to obtain them in writing from the copyright holder and provide copies with your submission. If you have omitted to provide permissions where we think they might be necessary, we will consult further with you.
Formats for references
The approach to citing sources in footnotes is described in the ‘Footnotes and references’ section of the Poise Style Guide.
Please bear in mind that the purpose of the rules below is to produce a high-quality piece that is reader-friendly. The more care that authors take, the less the load falls on the volunteer editors.
We would prefer to help you do it than do it all for you, but there are exceptions. For example, if we are republishing an existing piece that comes complete with its references, whether in a ‘References’ section or footnotes: the editorial team expects to take on the task of aligning them with the house style.
There are too many possible types of source to cover comprehensively here. The MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association) Style Guide, Chapter 11, is the basis of our approach. Note the important section 11.3 on ‘later references’ in which suggestions are given for abbreviating them.
Listed here are the commonest examples for references in footnotes, excluding later references, and with a handful of exceptions to the MHRA rules:
Names (of authors, editors etc) are always given with forenames preceding family names: ‘Pat Doe’, not ‘Doe, Pat’.
Titles of books and journals are in italics. Separate titles and sub-titles with a colon
Author names precede titles; but editors, translators, and revisers appear after titles: use abbreviations such as ‘ed. by’, ‘trans. by’, ‘rev. by’ .
Multiple names (whether authors, editors) are listed if less than four; otherwise state the first only and add ‘and others’.
Titles of chapters and journal articles should be enclosed in paired (left and right) quotation marks, but not put in italics.
For journal articles, provide the volume, issue number where there is one, date, and page-range of the article, plus the name of the issue if given (e.g. a special issue). In an exception to MHRA style, it is helpful to state ‘Vol.’ and ‘No.’ to avoid strings of numbers: ‘Vol. 1, No. 2’.
For online-only articles where page numbers are internal to the article not the issue or volume, there should normally be an article number or identifier that can be cited.
Journal titles should be given in full and not abbreviated.
For translated work, ensure the reference includes translator, original title, and date of original publication.
For books, append place of publication, publisher name, and date of publication in brackets using the format (Place: publisher, year): ‘(Graz: Mouritz, 2022)’.
First names can be omitted from publisher names: so ‘Gollancz’ not ‘Victor Gollancz’. Where there is more than one name, use ‘&’ or ‘and’ according what appears on the title page. You can also omit ‘Ltd.’ and the like from the end.
If a book was published in some little known city or town — Upper Beeding, W. Sussex, or Weed, CA., for example — then note the place (e.g. county, state), as well as the town or city, of publication.
Abbreviations can be used for counties and states. Also specify place in cases where a town may be mistaken for another — Cambridge, MA. or Cambridge, England, for example.
With international publishers, books may be published in multiple locations simultaneously: refer only to the location of the particular edition you have used as your source. This is normally stated; if not it can sometimes be inferred from the price.
Page numbers should normally be provided, using formats such as ‘p. 122’, ‘pp. 122-39’.
The page range for book chapters and articles in journals should be cited, followed by the specific page(s) in brackets a specific quote or point is being cited. (See examples v, vi.)
If a book is stated by the publisher to be a later edition, this should be indicated after the title (but not in italics), e.g. ‘2nd ed.’; similarly with drafts or other qualifiers.
Where a chapter in a book was previously published separately as an article, the details of the original publication should be given. Sometimes articles end up in more than one anthology: there is no obligation to refer to any of the anthologies if the original article is cited, but
- it is reader-friendly to cite at least one such anthology if the article is behind a journal pay-wall (but not otherwise); and
- please cite the anthology where the article is reprinted in an Alexander Technique anthology such as the papers of Frank Pierce Jones, Wilfred Barlow, Raymond Dart, Walter Carrington.
If the date of first publication is different from the date of the edition cited, put this in square brackets after the cited date.
For online sources, provide either the URL of the original piece and date of access OR the URL of its Digital Oject Identifier [DOI] (in which case date of access is not needed). A DOI is always preferred if available, as it should be permanent.
If the online source is a PDF or other document, you should provide the URL of the page from which the source was downloaded, not a direct link to the document itself.
In other respects, such as title, author, follow the rules for articles described above, unless the online resource can reasonably construed as an entire work.
URLs should normally be provided without the extraneous code that is sometimes appended (often following a question mark) such as how you got to the page or a session identifier — unless, of course, that is an essential to retrieving the page in question.
Be sure to include the protocol, such as ‘https://’ . This may not appear in the address line in your browser but will be included if you copy and paste the address.
Do not quote the abbreviated URLs generated by services such as tinyurl or bitly: use the original URL.
Enclose URLs in angle brackets (<>). The URL should appear as text and not include an active hyperlink unless the link is
- to a page on the Mouritz website.
- to a DOI
This avoids live linking to a hacked or hijacked website.
Date of access for a web resource is in the format ‘[accessed dd month yyyy]’.
When citing a GenAI tool such as ChatGPT, cite the tool used by you (such as ChatGPT, ChatGPT+)[treated as the work, and therefore in italics], the provider (such as OpenAI) [treated as the publisher], the prompt if it is not stated in the main text, the basic url of the tool (omitting any session or user info that won't work for another user), and the date of access (as above for online sources generally). Note that the 3rd edition of the MHRA Style Guide does not provide any guidance on citing GenAI sources; and other style guides adopt differing approaches to what is considered the work, the author, etc.
Examples
When referring to the examples, note that
- there would normally be a comma after the work cited, followed by the page number(s); this is shown for clarity in some of the examples;
- the formats shown apply to citations in footnotes, not to references in any bibliography.
Book, single author
(i) William Barlow, The Alexander Principle (London: Gollancz, 1991 [1973])
If the author is an institution or government list accordingly
(ii) STAT, Competencies for Teaching the Alexander Technique, Draft IVa (London: STAT, 2003).
Book or article, more than one author
(iii) Walter Carrington and Seán Carey, Explaining the Alexander Technique (London: Mouritz, 2004)
Chapter in book
(iv) Fr Geoffrey Curtis, ‘The Alexander principle and some spiritual disciplines’ in More Talk of Alexander, ed. by Wilfred Barlow (London: Gollancz, 1978), pp. 154-164 (pp. 158-9)
Chapter in book, previously a journal article
If citing the original article:
(v) Wilfred Barlow, ‘Anxiety and Muscle Tension’, British Journal of Physical Medicine, Vol. 10, No. 3 (May-June 1947), pp. 81-87 (p. 83); [reprinted in Wilfred Barlow, Postural Homeostasis: Papers and Letters on the Alexander Technique, ed. by Jean Fischer (London: Mouritz, 2014), pp. 27-42]
or, if citing the reprint (preferred for currently available anthologies):
(vi) Wilfred Barlow, ‘Anxiety and Muscle Tension’ in Postural Homeostasis: Papers and Letters on the Alexander Technique, ed. by Jean Fischer (London: Mouritz, 2014), pp. 27-42 (p. 34); [first publ. in British Journal of Physical Medicine, Vol. 10, No. 3 (May-June 1947), pp. 81-87]
Note that in these examples the use of square brackets and the semi-colon between the two sources is a minor variation from the MHRA format. The particular pages you are quoting go with the first of the references but can be omitted from the second.
Journal article
(vii) Malcolm Williamson, ‘Loose ends’, Statnews, Vol. 12, No. 1 (January 2023), pp. 20-24 (p. 22)
Personal communication
(viii) Frank Pierce Jones, personal communication: lesson, 17 May 1972
Online sources
(ix) ‘The “A1” Reputation of the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping’, Case Study #13, Global History of Capitalism Project (Oxford Centre for Global History), <https://globalcapitalism.history.ox.ac.uk/13-a1-reputation-lloyds-regist... [accessed 4 March 2022]
NB: the URL in this example should NOT be a live hyperlink: it is being added automatically by our software platform.
(x) ‘Edward Owen Interview Notes 1961–62’, ed. by Jean M. O. Fischer, pp. 3-4, available at <https://mouritz.org/library/database/item/interview-notes> [accessed 14 April 2022]
Generative Artificial Intelligence sources(See further below concerning the use of GenAI. The example here is for the rare case where an output from a GenAI tool is incorporated directly into the text.)
(xi) ChatGPT (OpenAI), response to ‘[state prompt]’, https://chat.openai.com/chat [accessed 12 May 2023]
Common sense variations
If a footnote include remarks about the source, a common-sense approach can be taken to dropping or re-ordering parts of the reference that are incorporated into the text of the footnote, with corresponding tweaks to the punctuation, e.g. (in a footnote)
In the 1973 first edition of The Alexander Principle (London: Gollancz), Wilfred Barlow claims ….. (pp. 44-48).
However, it is more reader-friendly—and hence preferred—to write a full reference rather than split such information between the main text and a footnote.
Citing works by F. M. Alexander
With exceptions noted below, and if at all possible, reference should be made to the scholarly editions of Alexander’s works produced by Mouritz.
In the case of The Use of the Self, where no scholarly edition exists, reference should normally be made to the Gollancz/Orion edition. Note that the page numbering of the main text is the same in the current Orion edition as in the 1985 Gollancz edition, although later editions omit the Preface by John Dewey.
The foregoing assumes you have access to the relevant edition (you may be able to borrow one!); otherwise, refer to the edition you have actually used.
Exceptions to the above include where the text focuses on differences between editions, and where text has been excised or radically altered in in later editions (as with Man’s Supreme Inheritance) where it may be important to cite the particular edition(s) being referenced.
In most circumstances the use of abbreviations, such as ‘MSI’ for Man’s Supreme Inheritance, is discouraged. Exceptions are possible, e.g. if the same abbreviation is used many times and is not interspersed with lots of other abbreviations. Not all our readers will be familiar with the abbreviations commonly used by the English-speaking Alexander teaching community. However, you can submit drafts that use abbreviations: an editorial decision will be taken about whether these should be converted to the full form using Find-and-replace.
If citing Alexander’s Letters¸ reference should be made to the correspondent and date; include this in the footnote if it is not stated in the main text.
If citing material in Articles and Letters, note the standard requirement to cite details of the original publication as well as the section in Articles and Letters .
If citing the first edition of Man’s Supreme Inheritance, the Addenda of 1911, or Conscious Control, if possible include the page number of the 2021 Mouritz facsimile edition as well as the page number in the original edition.
Bibliography
A bibliography can be provided, but note that all the necessary information about referenced sources should be provided in the footnotes as described above: a bibliography, if provided, is a bonus for the reader rather than being essential.
A bibliography, if provided, should list all referenced sources but, unlike a reference list, may contain further material that the author has consulted in preparing the piece but has not cited in the text. If there are very many sources, these might be split down into sections: for example, in humanities monographs it is common to split bibliographies between primary and secondary sources.
The order of works in a bibliography is alphabetical by author or editor name. The format of references in a bibliography is similar to that in footnotes EXCEPT
- only the name of the first author/editor should have the surname placed first, e.g.
Alexander, F. Matthias; - thus, any other contributors should be listed as they would be in footnote references, e.g.
Carrington, Walter and Seán Carey - for edited works that do not have an author, the name of the editor(s) should precede the title of the work, e.g.
Doe, Pat, ed., Collected Tasmanian Ballads (London: Routledge, 1944)
Where there is more than one work by a given author, they should be listed alphabetically by title (not by date), ignoring any in/definite article such as “A”, “The”. The author name need only appear for the first work; the other sources should be preceded by three em-dashes:
Alexander, F. Matthias, The Universal Constant in Living, ed. by Jean M. O. Fischer (London: Mouritz, 2000 [1941])
——— The Use of the Self (London: Gollancz, 1985 [1931])
For fuller details of formatting in a bibliography, refer to the MHRA Style Guide, Section 11.6.
Using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools
There are considerable risks attached to GenAI tools such as ChatGPT (text generation) or DALL-E2 (image generation). For example, as GenAI tools work from databases culled from existing sources, they may infringe strict European (and UK) copyright laws, and/or plagiarise. They have also been proven to generate non-existent or erroneous references and sources.
Mouritz is jointly responsible with authors for any infringements of intellectual property laws. To help avoid such issues, any use of GenAI tools to help produce content for Poise is subject to the following rules and requirements:
- You should provide full details of any use of GenAI tools from the outset, including any intended further use as your piece progresses.
- You remain fully responsible for checking that any material created with the help of GenAI does not infringe copyright and does not constitute plagiarism.
- If you use AI-generated material that contains material subject to copyright, you must obtain any necessary permissions and provide the required acknowledgment(s).
The starting place for contributors to Poise is to keep a full audit trail of your interactions with any GenAI tool you use, including date, version, prompts, and output. You should provide us with this audit trail as a matter of course. Documenting the use of GenAI is part of a collaborative process that will help us identify risks and benefits. This will allow us to identify what is appropriate and what is inappropriate and improve guidance over time.
In the published contribution, varying degrees of detail about the use of GenAI may appear and these may be split between different various places, all depending on the circumstances. But there should always be some mention in an Acknowledgments section. See below for further details.
Acknowledging and describing the use of GenAI
Based on our current understanding of how GenAI tools might be used, we propose the following framework:
| Use made of GenAI tool | Acknowledgment and Description | References |
|---|---|---|
| Indirect | ||
| Provision of information and of information sources |
Acknowledgment in general terms citing name and url of tool and name of the provider, but making it clear that everything provided by GenAI has been checked in detail for accuracy. |
None referring to GenAI. Independent sources must be used to verify any information provided and it is these that must be cited. |
| Suggestions for research questions or approach to writing or structuring an article | Acknowledgment in general terms citing name and url of tool, date(s) used, and name of provider. An editorial decision would be made about what level of Description might be included in the finished piece and where, e.g. in an Appendix or as part of the main article in a Research Methods section. |
Not required |
| Direct | ||
| Improvements in language and grammar; translation from foreign language into English |
Acknowledgment in general terms citing name and url of tool, name of provider, scope of use. |
Not required. |
| Generation of text, tables, graphs, and the like embedded in the piece, whether subsequently edited or not. |
Acknowledgment in general terms citing name and url of tool and name of provider. |
Source stated in footnote. Scope of any amendments noted. |
| Generation of image | Acknowledgment in general terms citing name and url of tool and name of provider. | Source stated in footnote or caption. Scope of any amendments noted. |
See the Format section above for an example of a citation of a GenAI source in a footnote.
Example of an acknowledgment:
OpenAI's ChatGPT tool has been used to help improve grammar and language. https://chat.openai.com/chat.
More specific information about, for example, prompts, versions (i.e. date of chat), would belong elsewhere if required and the editors would deal with those requirements case by case.
Unacknowledged use of GenAI tools, failure to cite sources, or plagiarism will, if discovered, be notified to Poise readers as soon as possible as part of the public record; offending material will be retracted.
