I am putting together a scholarly poster for my insect discoveries of Apidae in Magnuson Park, Seattle, WA. When I go to the map view of my contributions to the Project “Biodiversity of Magnuson Park, Seattle WA,” I come across this lovely map (see screenshot below) that shows the spatial distribution of my observations at the park that I want to include. How do I cite this map inset (both in caption and in the References Section)? I want to give credit to both iNaturalist and Google Maps but I am not sure how. In the FAQs iNaturalist gives me a pretty general citation format to follow (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#cite), and I have already read through the Google Maps attribution guidelines at https://www.google.com/permissions/geoguidelines/attr-guide/. But it appears I still need help. Thanks in advance!
Welcome to the forum!
i guess it depends on which style you’re using for citation.
MLA would be something like:
Map of Camille Isben’s contributions to Biodiversity of Magnuson Park, Seattle, WA, project. iNaturalist, 2020, www.inaturalist.org.
(optionally, you could add “Accessed 30 May 2020.” to the end of the above.)
APA would be something like:
iNaturalist.(n.d.), [Map of Camille Isben’s contributions to Biodiversity of Magnuson Park, Seattle, WA, project]. Retrieved 30 May 2020, from www.inaturalist.org/projects/biodiversity-of-magnuson-park-seattle-wa/contributors/ibsenc.
Chicago would be something like:
iNaturalist. “Map of Camille Isben’s contributions to Biodiversity of Magnuson Park, Seattle, WA, project.” Accessed 30 May 2020. www.inaturalist.org/projects/biodiversity-of-magnuson-park-seattle-wa/contributors/ibsenc.
if you have the one map image, you shouldn’t have to separately credit Google, as long as you keep the entire attribution that is printed at the bottom right of the map. in this case, it looks like the attribution has either been cropped or else the page didn’t properly display the attribution. (if you cropped it, you’ll want to crop it in a way where the attribution is preserved. if the page didn’t display the full attribution, that page may need to be fixed. if the latter case, which page did you grab the map from?)
In this case the citation in text would be: (iNaturalist 2020)? That’s interesting, I had not thought about citing it that way before.
yeah… i think MLA is more used in humanities. they recommend more simplification in the references for whatever reason. i would tend to use something closer to the APA or Chicago styles. i don’t really think the specific style matters as long as someone else can actually use your reference to get back to the original source.
here’s another style (Harvard):
iNaturalist. (n.d.). Map of Camille Isben’s contributions to Biodiversity of Magnuson Park, Seattle, WA, project. Available from: www.inaturalist.org/projects/biodiversity-of-magnuson-park-seattle-wa/contributors/ibsenc. [30 May 2020].
Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly! This is really helpful. Also, regarding the attribution on the screenshot, for some reason, when I had zoomed in enough (I was trying to zoom in to get the map to fill my whole screen for the best quality possible) it dropped off the Google part. When I zoomed out, Google came back but it was too far out to give me a good clear image. I guess I will just do my best to use a complete reference as shown above and go from there. Again, thank you for your help!
Thank you! I’m glad to be here!
Soon you will be as addicted to iNat as we are, lol. Have a great time!
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