RootsMagic 8 Confusion with Sources and Citations

By Linda Vich on Mon, 01/24/2022 - 12:13

Forums

I am hopeful that someone here can guide me. I use RootsMagic 8 and have been using the Sources provided in the program or those from Ancestry, etc. for the actual Source. In viewing EE, I would like to do a better job of sources/citations but now I am confused.

In RootsMagic, a Master Source is a general record that may be used again and again. Where my confusion lies is in how to input a correct Source Citation for the specific person, that a specific part of a Master Source refers to. Do I simply customize the Footnote or does it go somewhere else?

I am not wanting to be perfect but going forward, I would like to do a better job within the confines of RootsMagic.

Can a RootsMagic user guide me on this??

Also, since I don't generate reports, do I really need anything more than a footnote?

Thank you!

Submitted byEEon Tue, 01/25/2022 - 09:03

Welcome, Linda Vich. We'd be delighted to help you with any part of citation or evidence analysis whose coverage in EE (the book) is not clear to you, or on any type of document that EE does not cover. What we cannot do is give you advice on how to use this-or-that genealogical software. For help with that, you need to join a forum that focuses specifically on your software.

With regard to your last question, let's look at those three formats. You may then decide what is necessary for you.

Reference Notes

Almost all documentation that historical researchers record (including family historians) is done as footnotes or endnotes. When we assert a fact—whether in our working database or a piece of writing—we are expected to attach a reference note to that individual assertion, providing evidence for that assertion.  Also, when we gather an image for our research files, the citation we attach to the image will be in full reference note format.

Beyond that, when genealogists decide to produce a biographical sketch of a person or an article or a book, footnotes or endnotes will still be the format they use.

"Shortened" citations are traditional in published works, as a space-saving measure. Today, when much work is published electronically, researchers and writers may decide not to use them. Many of my own research reports at my personal website Historical Pathways do not use shortened citations because online users frequently grab one page that is of interest to them and then would not have the full citations they need to understand or verify the information I've provided.  By contrast, all the published,  peer-reviewed articles I've posted there under the "Articles" tab do use shortened subsequent citations because the publications in which they appeared do follow that practice as a space-saving measure.

Source Lists (Bibliographies)

History researchers use source lists in one of two contexts:

  • Professional researchers (and genealogists who conduct professional-level work on their own families) add source lists to their research reports to provide a quick overview of what has been consulted in that research segment.
  • The most common use of source lists are in books. In the history field, they are not common for short works because they would repeat (in alphabetical order), the sources already identified in the footnotes.  Well-done, published genealogies also rarely include a back-of-the-book Source List, because a well-researched family will include thousands upon thousands of sources, most of them in manuscript form, as opposed to the "list of books" (bibliographies) one commonly sees in books by other types of historians.

However, a magazine that produces "light reading"—and traditional encyclopedias that provide overviews of a subject—will typically omit all reference notes and substitute a very short source list as "suggested reading."

In short, our decision as to the type of citation we create depends upon our purpose and our audience.

Reports

You specifically mentioned "reports." This word needs clarification. Your database software (and others of its type) uses the word "report" for whatever type of print-out you want to run from the data you've entered. Everything you print out is the software's "report" of what you've entered. Almost all users of this software find it essential to run "reports" of one type or another, for one reason or another.

However, the larger research world uses that term "report" more specifically to mean a written account of a specific block of research—one that identifies the research problem, provides the details on which the search is grounded, identifies all sources and methods used in that block of research, provides abstracts or transcriptions of all documents found, analyzes those findings, and reaches conclusions or provides a work list for further research based on new findings.  In this context, printouts from relational databases are not considered "research reports." See QuickLesson 20: Research Reports for Research Success.