Generally speaking at the very basic level, genealogists should cite:
- conclusions that were not their own (who said it, when and where it was published) ;
- statements made in documents (the document and how you got it);
- images they didn’t make (where it came from, who made it, etc.);
- conclusions they reached (how you reached it and what was used to reach it).
Of course permissions to use materials may be required in some cases and one should never indicate that they said or wrote something when it was actually someone else who said or wrote it.
The details of citing are more specific than this, but this is a good place to start and a good set of generalities to keep in mind.
And remember…the genealogy world won’t end if your citations and sources are not formatted perfectly. The idea is that you want to know where you got stuff–so you can track your process and improve your analysis.
There’s more about genealogy standards in Genealogy Standards Manual written by the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG).
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