Our citation style

Shift, the boy

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We are using a custom citation style that push the source title first, then the author, then the URL, and the date of publication. Additional notes describing the context can be added latter.

  • "Article Title" - Author(s). Publisher/Publication (Media Publication Date). URL (Online Publication Date). Additional Context.

Borrowing inspiration from IEEE, it is possible to assign reference numbers (like 1 and PLA00) to them for easier recall through in-text citations:

We designed this citation style to be:

  • Web-first,
  • compatible with Markdown and HTML,
  • no need to worry about margins in typesetting (as in APA),
  • no need to recount all the references from in-text citations into a dedicated References/Bibliography list,
  • same citation structure to virtually any types of cited content.

Table of Contents

Article Title

Unlike the APA citation style, no matter what kind of source that is being cited (e.g., a book, or a webpage), the title will be quoted within a pair of double-quotes. The title is always written in italic to ease text parsing by machines.

Quote the title as-is for up to the first 20 words, even when the title contain some double quotes, or written in uppercase/lowercase. There are some technical and legal reasons to preserve the title verbatim. We borrow the APA Style's convention to quote up to the first 20 words for the title, but when the title exceeds the limit, an ellipsis character (either ... or …) should be used at the end of the title.

  • ""let's optimize," said her" - Author Name.
  • "I spent $100 on a mobile game - here's what I felt after that." - Author Name.

Be careful when quoting webpages, since the article/page title may have been combined with the website title, as in HTML's <title> attribute. Here is a couple of examples.

Our citation style discourages mentioning the title of the publication as long as the canonical URL has been present. The above examples should have been shortened to:

Referring to sub-sections.

When referring to sections, or a (sub-)chapter, you can use ">" symbol to specify those chapters. Additionally, you can also extend the URL to include the specific fragment (#) of the HTML document, like this:

or this (may only work in newer web browsers, and will break if the title is updated slightly):

Referring to specific pages or slides.

When referring to sections, or a (sub-)chapter, you can use ">" symbol to specify those pages too. We use p. and pp. abbreviations to refer to specific page(s) and slide(s).

How about academic publications?

To keep the simplicity of the citation format itself, most of the publication details (like the publisher city of origin, and the page numbers within an academic journal where the paper is found on) are omitted.

They are made simple because the Internet inftastructure as of today that makes it easy to retrieve an online resource by DOI, ISBN, ISSN, and other means of online document identifier.

  • For peer-reviewed academic articles that have a DOI assigned to it, use the full DOI URL in the URL section.
  • For books that have an ISBN assigned to it, mention the ISBN on the Additional Context format.

Authors

Authors are typically written in a first name to last/family name basis except for Chinese and Korean names, where the family name is quoted first. Statutory marks (e.g., college degrees, membership status, Senior Member, IEEE) on names are not written. Abbreviations are not compulsory and discouraged in writing less than 3 authors. But if they do, they should not conceal the full last/family name. () brackets can be used to add important context or identifiers:

  • Reinhart Previano Koentjoro
  • Reinhart P. Koentjoro
  • R.P. Koentjoro (ORCID 0000-0001-9076-2428)
  • Qantas Airways Limited (ABN 16 009 661 901)
  • The ASF (formerly The Apache Software Foundation)

To avoid ambiguity with multiple authors, author names that have any comma characters (,) should be wrapped in double quotes:

  • "Shift, the boy", "Shift, the girl"

You may note any 1:N relationships between the organizations that are affiliated with the authors, using the {} curly braces in the following format:

  • Organization Name {Author 1, Author 2, ...}

This method is also encouraged to explicitly specify the name of a business entity separately from the brand or trading name used by the business to author the resource. For example:

  • Cloudflare {Jérôme Schneider, Nikita Lapkov, Marc Selwan}
  • Woolworths Group {Big W}

This information can be omitted if the relationship model is represented in a M:N ratio, where at least one author is affiliated to multiple organizations in the interest of the cited resource. This is typically common in peer-reviewed academic literature, and the relationships have been explicitly marked on each published papers.

Publisher/Publication Name

This information is often omitted for webpage articles, since much of its identity rely on the URL domain names (e.g., theverge.com for The Verge), and some publication title names (e.g., The Digital Era, The Keyword) may not be understandable without looking the context of the URLs where the sites are hosted on (e.g., blog.google for The Keyword).

Date, Time, and Revisions

We use the YYYY-MM-DD format for date and 24-hour hh:mm:ss format for time. Both information will be presented in the format of YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss referring to the UTC/GMT timestamp where the content is canonically "published".

There are two primary locations for date and time. As shown in the example below, the first Date entry (2016, 7th ed.) refers to the actual publication of the source (book) itself. The latter one (n.d, accessed 2025-12-19) refers to when information of the book was published online.

Denoting editions of books

Editions should be written verbatim. For example, "7th" ed. was chosen as it is allowed by the publisher to write the edition number in the specified format.

URL and Identifiers

URLs are allowed to be cited as long it points to a canonical representation of the resource. For example, a book entry's URL could refer to the publisher-assigned URL that identifies the book, but should not referring to non publisher-owned bookstores or resellers selling copies of the item.

Always attempt to use the full canonical URL instead of shortened versions (e.g., links generated from popular URL shortening services like 1drv.ms, bit.ly, forms.gle, and youtu.be). URL parameters that are non-essential to identify the resource should be omitted (like ?utm_campaign=blackfri25 and ?hl=en). Do not truncate or remove www. if the canonical URL refers or redirects to the www. subdomain of the website.

If there is no any canonical URL assigned for the content, such as due to PESOS online content posting syndication strategy (indieweb.org), multiple URLs may be placed next to each other in alphabetical order.

Leave a whitespace character between the end of an URL with the next punctuation mark, such as (https://www.google.com .) instead of (https://www.google.com.) This will help computer command-line interfaces to extract the URL properly.

Additional Context

The Additional Context section allows the freedom to extend our citation format depending on each needs.

EAN, ISBN, and ISSN numbers

The latest ISBN and ISSN standards are made to comply with the EAN standard. That means it is also possible to cite a product this way:

  • "Sunrice Long Grain White Rice Pouch 250g" - Ricegrowers Limited (n.d). EAN: 9310140001906.

Multiple numbers (like online versus print ISBNs) are ordered in ascending/increasing numerical value.

  • "Systems analysis and design: In a changing world" - J.W. Satzinger, R.B. Jackson, S.D. Burd. Cengage Learning (2016, 7th ed.). ISBN: 9780357687833 / 9781305117204.

"As referred in" relations

Using sublists, it is possible to state this relationship.

Free-form text of context

Feel free to add additional context, whether it's in line with the citation, or presented as a sublist. Some examples: