Forums, Chats, Listservs, & Bulletin Boards
MLA:
Levy, Michael. “Re: your canon?” Listserv. 19 Apr. 2006. Science Fiction Research
[author.] [“title or subject line.”] [type of post.] [posting date.] [discussion group.]
Association. 26 June 2006 <sfra-l@wiz.cath.vt.edu>.
[date of access] [<discussion group address>.]APA:
Levy, M. (2006, April 19). Re: your canon? Retrieved June 26, 2006,
[author.] [(posting date).] [title or subject line.] [Retrieved date of access,]
from sfra-l@wiz.cath.vt.edu.
[from address.]Chicago:
24. Levy, “Re: your canon?”
[fn. #.] [author last name, ”title or subject heading.”]
[Shortened Chicago reference; see More Notes on Chicago Style for more information.]
[Note: In the Bibliography, Chicago style does not generally include date of access.]
There are many electronic forums that allow users with a specific interest or affiliation to discuss topics with each other. Some of these are restricted to members of a group, or of a specific course. (Many Yale courses, for instance, provide forum discussions through the Classesv2 server.) Other such discussions are open to any interested party. Although discussions limited to professionals in a field may be more authoritative, in general you should probably treat material from these forums as popular rather than scholarly sources. See Scholarly vs. Popular Sources for more information.
Note: Many such forums expect communications to be private. Be sure to check the group’s policies on reproduction of such material. Even if an FAQ or moderator seems to make reproduction permissible, a decent respect for privacy suggests that you secure the poster’s permission before making the material public.
If you use material from an electronic forum, list by author’s name. Follow that with the most specific identifying information you can give about the particular post. Depending on the type of discussion, there may be subject headings or specific message numbers on a given post. You may or may not be able to tell the posting date.
In MLA style, include the name of the sponsoring forum: this means including both the organization or group that hosts the discussion and a word that identifies the kind of posting (Forum, Listserv, etc.). Although this genre is still evolving, indicating that the material is from a listserv or class forum will alert your readers to what is sometimes a more casual or meditative tone in texts of this nature. Since most of these discussions do not supervise postings, do not put the sponsor name in italics. Follow this with the date you accessed the material. Even when membership is restricted to a particular organization, most listervs should probably be treated as popular rather than scholarly sources. See Scholarly vs. Popular Sources for more information.
The last item in your listing—the electronic address—brings up one point on which MLA and APA styles differ starkly: in APA, if the posting cannot be retrieved, you cite it in your paper as a personal communication and do not include it in your list of References. Even in MLA style, it’s better to cite the message in the form that’s most easily accessible to your reader: many listservs archive their messages on the web, for instance, even though the original postings are delivered by email. Try to include the archive address.
Note: As discussed in How To Quote, it’s often useful to identify your source in the body of your paper (and not just in your citation or footnote); this identification is especially important when you use listservs. If you give a sense of what kind of Websource you’re using, the reader will be better able to understand the context of your evidence. See Special Demands of Internet Sources for more information.
Note, also: You may notice that listing Internet sources often takes more time and care than listing print sources. Since the authorship and location of Web sources are harder to establish, readers need even more information in order to assess sources and to retrieve them for further study. See Special Demands of Internet Sources for more information.
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