Citing ctext.org

A friendly reminder to be sure to cite ctext.org for those who utilize it.

ctext.org is an invaluable resource and asset to the field. It allows us all a free, quick, and easy way to look up texts we see cited, as well as the ability to look up concordance references. The field is tremendously better off with ctext. This is why it is very important to give the site and its creator/editor, Donald Sturgeon, formal credit in bibliographies, forewords, and footnotes, as per standard academic practice. I am moved to say this because I’ve lately become aware of works that look to be utilizing ctext.org, but fail to formally attribute it in bibliographic material. Instruction on how to cite ctext.org texts can be found here: http://ctext.org/faq/cite

6 replies on “Citing ctext.org”

  1. Let me add that texts from ctext.org can be filled with errors (some moreso than others), so people copy and paste from it at their own risk. It’s an extremely convenient resource and I’ve encouraged my university to contribute real money to the project, but it’s still far from reliable. Needless to say, input errors lead to both false positives and false negatives. I’ve encountered mistaken graphs, skipped text, incomplete sections, and questionable punctuation.

    • Any mistakes found are quickly corrected if you let Donald know about them. Also, if one wants to verify the text, he usually has links (top right: “Library Resources”) to the scanned pages from his sources.

    • @Scott, @Bill: Correct and correct, but that still doesn’t mean it’s a reliable source for copying and pasting text–let alone, as some people use it, as a database for statistical analysis.

      Not to disparage ctext.org (I use it myself), but there are many other databases that the warpweftandway community ought to consider, listed here more or less in order of reliability:

      http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihp/hanji.htm
      Scripta Sinica, from Academia Sinica, Taiwan. There are free and paid versions. (The latter is much better, of course, but your library has to be willing to spring for it.)

      http://210.69.170.100/s25/index.htm
      Hanquan 寒泉, hosted by the Palace Museum in Taipei

      http://www.hytung.cn/
      Hantang dianzang shujuku 瀚堂典藏數据庫 (formerly called Longyu hantang 龍語瀚堂), covering many different genres, including palaeographical literature; unfortunately the new site doesn’t always load well

      http://www.hkshp.org/
      The Hong Kong Society of Humanities, with many online philosophical texts—look in the center, under the heading 網上中國文化及哲學經典

      http://guji.artx.cn/
      Zhongguo guji quanlu 中國古籍全錄, a growing database with many less-than-famous texts not included in other online resources

      http://sangle.web.wesleyan.edu/etext/index.html
      Chinese Philosophical Etext Archive–I’m sure you all know this one, since it’s hosted by Wesleyan University

      http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/xwomen/sitemap.html#
      Traditions of Exemplary Women, hosted by the University of Virginia and focusing on the Lienü zhuan 列女傳, but with other full-text resources as well (click on “Source Texts”); I have found input errors here too, however

      http://wengu.tartarie.com/wg/wengu.php
      basic Chinese texts with word-for-word annotation, très français

      http://sou-yun.com/
      big poetry database, all in simplified characters

      http://www.xys.org/library.html
      Xinyusi 新語絲 database

      http://cls.hs.yzu.edu.tw/home.htm
      hosted by Yuanze University 元智大學 and specializing in literature

      http://www.wenzi.cn/web/content.aspx?moduleid=21&parentid=20
      a palaeography database hosted by East China Normal University 華東師範大學

      http://ytenx.org/
      Yün-tien wang 韻典網, a database of rhyming dictionaries

      Finally, there are many new subscription-only databases (in addition to the paid version of Scripta Serica) that make searching through huge gobs of text much easier than ever before, but you’d have to talk to your librarian about subscribing to them. At Penn, we have just added 中國基本古籍庫, which is massive.

    • P.S. Among the subscription-only databases, I neglected to mention the searchable Siku quanshu 四庫全書 and CHANT 漢達文庫 (short for Chinese Ancient Texts, hosted at the D.C. Lau Research Centre for Chinese Ancient Texts), but they’re both old enough that I think most people know about them.

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