Home | Site Index | News | Contact me |

Acct 351com Resources | Acct 351 | Acct 380 | Acct 351com | General Information | CSUN

Quotations Paraphrase Citation

Bibliographic References:   Book | Article     Accounting Standard         Web page

 I Reasons for Quotations:

Why should you include quotations in your documents? Quotations or paraphrases are used to support statements made in a document and/or to illustrate a point. In academic writing they are essential to support the legitimacy of arguments, in technical writing they serve the same purpose. In other words: You should quote or paraphrase other authors! But, it is important to do it the correct way. Follow the rules and examples provided below and you will produce professional papers/memos/essays; you will not face the embarrassment of having to defend yourself against a charge of plagiarism; and you will impress your readers (especially professors!) with the amount of research you have done.

Remember: It is perfectly ok to use somebody else's work, as long as you acknowledge it!

II How to quote, paraphrase or cite correctly:

(All examples unless otherwise noted, are taken from "Relative Forecast Accuracy and the Timing of Earnings Forecast Announcements" by John M. Hassell and Robert H. Jennings (The Accounting Review, Vol. LXI, No.1 January 1986, pp. 58 - 75))

  1. Short quotation (less than about 30 words)

    2. Short quotations are imbedded in the text and are indicated through quotation marks:

    Example:

    Givoly and Lakonishok [1984, p. 117] assert: "Earnings per-share emerge from various studies as the single most important

    accounting variable in the eyes of investors." Aiding the dissemination of such information, the financial press

    prominently displays .....
  2. Long quotations (more than about 30 words)

    3. Long quotations are indented, single spaced, no quotation marks are used:

    Example:

    For example, one issue raised by Gonedes, Dopuch and Penman [1976] (hereafter GDP) is whether management forecasts

    are a perfect substitute for financial analyst forecasts. They offer the following argument against this proposition (p. 105):

    This may be the case when, for example, the "quality" of management's forecast is not viewed

    As being the same as that of the other forecasts

    To the extent that quality and accuracy ....
  3. Paraphrase

    4. The difference between a quotation and a paraphrase is that a quotation replicates the exact text, whereas a paraphrase repeats the meaning, but not the exact words, of another author's sentence or paragraph.

    Example:

    A recent article by Ajinkya and Gift [1984, p. 426] proposes an "expectations adjustment" hypothesis which posits that management forecasts are intended to adjust prevailing market expectations toward management's beliefs about future earnings. They find stock price reactions to the release of management forecasts that are consistent with this conjecture.

  4. Citation

Citations are used to provide support for an argument (in other words "I'm not the only one to say this", or " see, I am building on so and so's work")

Example

Ruland [1978] and Jaggi [1980] develop samples of analyst forecasts issued both before and after the release of management forecasts.

Example of a citation of a Financial Accounting Standard:

Starting in December 1984, SFAS No. 81 required each firm to disclose information regarding its PRB plan in footnotes to the financial statements.

And:

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) tried to mitigate this problem by requiring some disclosure about the sensitivity of the PRB obligation and annual cost to the choice of the health care cost trend rate [SFAS No. 106, par. 74]

(examples taken from "The Market Value of Accounting Information: The Case of Postretirement Benefits other than Pensions" by Eli Amir (The Accounting Review Vol. 68, No. 4, October 1993, pp. 703-724)

Citations may appear in footnotes as in the next example:

Example

See Abdel-khali and Thompson [1977] and Givoly and Lakonishok [1984] for reviews of empirical literature dealing with earnings forecasts. Gonedes [1974] and Chang and Most [1980] provide empirical evidence that investors desire to acquire information concerning future earnings per share data.

III Bibliographic Reference

Once you have cited an author in your text, you must provide a bibliographic reference:

Examples: (Journal Article)

Abdel-khalik, A. Rashad andRobert B. Thompson, " Research on Earnings Forecasts: The State of the Art," The Accounting Journal (Winter 1977-1978), pp. 180-209

Bibliographic reference to a book:

DeGroot, Morris, Probability and Statistics (Addison-Wesley, 1975)

To an accounting standard:

Financial Accounting Standards Board. 1984. Statement of Financial Accounting Standard No. 81: Disclosure of Postretirement Health Care and Life Insurance Benefits. Stamford, CT: FASB.

To a web page: You must provide the complete URL of the referenced web page and the date on which you accessed the site (be specific):

On March 3, 1997 Dupont split its stock teo-for-one.  According to Chairman Edward s. Woolard, "Splitting the company's stock will result in a market price that is more attractive to  broader group of investors." (Dupont news release, 3/3/1997)

Dupont News Release (March 3, 1997),  http://www.dupont.com/corp/whats-new/releases/970303.html

 Accessed 3/15/99

Note 1:  It would not be sufficient to have only the URL to Dupont's webpage (i.e., www.dupont.com) instead you must include the complete reference which will actually take the reader to the page cited.  

Note 2:  The safest and easisest way to ensure that you are actually inserting the correct URL is to copy and paste:

  1. Go to the page on the web that you wish to reference. 
  2. Highlight the entire address (URL)
  3. Then click on Edit and Copy (or Ctrl + C)
  4. Return to your bibliography
  5. Click on  Edit and Paste (or Ctrl + V)

This approach is a lot safer then trying to type in the correct URL. To ensure that you remember where you found someting in the web, bookmark the pages you use in your work!

Return to top

This site is prepared and maintained by Heidemarie.Lundblad@csun.edu