Template:Cite/doc

The Citation template is a versatile template for citing books, periodicals, contributions in collective works, patents, and web-sites. Its goal is to be an all-purpose citation template. It also has functionality to aid the use of the Harvard referencing style. The template allows author-date ("Harvard") citations in the main body of text to link to a full citation (generated by this template) in a "References" section at the end of the article via the Template:Harvard citation template. This template creates an HTML anchor, linked by #CITEREF followed by up to 4 author/editor last names and the date, to which the Harvard citation and related templates can link.

The template knows whether you are citing a book, periodical, or a chapter in a compilation, depending on which combination of parameters you use. For use with author-date systems such as the Harvard citation template, use of last and date parameters should be considered compulsory, where possible.

This template produces equivalent output to the "Cite" templates. You can use it as a synonym for cite journal, cite book, cite paper, and the same output as cite news, cite web, cite encyclopedia, and cite mailing list can be obtained using different parameter names. You may wish to change the format of punctuation marks using the sep parameter.

Dates
The Manual of Style states that linking of dates purely for the purpose of auto-formatting is now deprecated, so the date and publication-date parameters should use one of the following formats Ideally the format of all dates in the references of an article should uses a consistent style.
 * date=February 14, 1990 (comma required)
 * date=14 February 1990
 * date=February 1990
 * date=1990

For the accessdate parameter, unlinked ISO 8601 format 2008-07-25 is preferred.

Tools
See Citing sources for a list of tools which can help create a reference in the 'citation' format.