Citing Sources and Formatting Quotes in Policies

Like most readers of this blog, I regularly provide feedback on policy drafts that are being created on my campus in the required official template.  We also have a style guide that describes how to handle specific situations when writing a policy, such as how to list a reference to another policy manual.  My office has only been managing the policy process on campus for a couple of years, so I can’t say I’ve seen it all, but my formatting feedback usually ends up being, nonetheless, fairly routine: Don’t capitalize this term, put that in bold, etc.  Even so, one policy writer recently asked a question that we found a bit tricky to respond to. 

Like many policy templates, ours allows for a definitions section and, in that section, the writer wanted to use direct quotes taken from the professional publications in her specialty area.  The definitions were useful and it would have been difficult to paraphrase them. Even if they were reworded, the credit for the ideas still belonged with the organization that developed them.  The writer felt strongly about citing her sources, to her credit, and, as we have academic honesty and research ethics policies that we hold our students and faculty to, we believed our policies should conform to a similar standard.

No one disagreed with this in principle, but making it work within our template was not as simple as it might seem.  Our template contains a “related regulations, statutes, policies, and procedures” section where writers can provide links to anything they’ve referred to in the policy (example is below).

Related Regulations, Statutes, Policies, and Procedures

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII)  
Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 (Title IX)
Georgia Mandatory Reporting Law O.C.G.A. §19-7-5

This section didn’t seem like a good fit for this particular use mainly because the works being quoted were not regulations, statutes, policies, or procedures.  We also discussed whether in-text citations, such as those described in a standard academic format like APA or Chicago style, were appropriate but that just didn’t feel right either. An additional complication is that the tool we use to publish our policies won’t accommodate footnotes or endnotes, so any citation style that used them was impossible. Readers of policy interact with those documents differently than do readers of academic work and we wanted to keep things as clear as possible. 

The final result was that we used quotation marks in the definition and created a new section at the end, in place of the “related regulations…” section.  An example is below:

Open access: Literature that is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”

Related References

Source of definition of open access

This may not be our final solution, but the process of developing it caused some robust discussion about how readers interact with scholarly versus administrative documents, as well as how to give credit in a way that doesn’t confuse the reader and conforms to academic honesty principles, if not the exact details of citation structures

Do you allow policy writers on your campus to directly quote sources?  If so, how do you handle it in your policies?