Website Page on Government Site

By Eventide on Thu, 10/24/2019 - 12:39

Forums

I'm looking to use some information off a page of Maine.gov regarding Vital Records, but I am struggling on how to present the agency and division in the citation. I am having difficulty figuring out the structure of how the agency is set up and how much of it I need to include in the citation.

This is what I have.

Division of Data, Research, and Vital Statistics, Division Of Public Health Systems, Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention, A Division of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, “Vital Records" Maine.gov, (https://www.maine.gov/dhhs/mecdc/public-health-systems/data-research/vital-records : accessed 23 October 2019)

Submitted byEEon Thu, 10/24/2019 - 14:22

Ah, yes, Eventide. The layers of bureaucracy do cause us struggles in all sorts of ways.  In this case, rational arguments might be made for several variants in the identity of the creator, webpage, and website. What you've decided upon works fine. EE would likely shorten it to the portion of the bureaucracy that covers the function relevant to the information you seek (i.e., vital records):

Division of Data, Research, and Vital Statistics, “Vital Records," Maine.gov (https://www.maine.gov/dhhs/mecdc/public-health-systems/data-research/vital-records : accessed 23 October 2019) .

EE would also tinker in two other ways that are flagged by the yellow highlighting.

  1. The name of the webpage and the name of the website should be separated by a comma.
  2. A comma after the website title is superfluous because the punctuation that follows the title is the open parenthesis.  To get into the weeds here, in a sentence-style citation the publication details always go into parentheses because they modify the identity of the website or book title; the act of putting "further information" into parentheses always attaches it to what comes before it. Conversely, commas separate. A comma before a parentheses would undo what you're trying to accomplish by using the parentheses.