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citations and references to other documents in a policy document
Subject:citations and references to other documents in a policy document From:"Brezinski, Brittany" <brittany -dot- brezinski -at- bestwestern -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:52:55 -0700
Please help!
I am a Lone Writer for a small company who is tasked with creating the
templates and standards for the Information Services (IS) business unit.
Since I am the only writer, the templates are intended for all IS users.
Currently, I am working on a policy template, which includes the
following sections: Document Revisions, Purpose, Scope, Definitions,
References, Policy and Responsibility Chart. The template includes
guidelines for using each section in the document.
In the References section, I simply tell the users to list any
references to other material such as hyperlinks to the associated
process document and work instruction (examples of internal documents).
I didn't give this much thought obviously --- I was mostly thinking of
interdepartmental documents when I created the template. After
discovering the hard way that I did not consider external sources, I
need to write guidelines for including citations within the policy
statements and references to external documents and Web sites. Is it
acceptable to include informal references to published material in a
company's policy document?
For instance, an Information Security officer in my organization wrote a
policy document using my template. In the References section, he copied
control objectives and standards directly from COBIT 4.1 and PCI DSS
documents (external sources), but did not include complete references to
the sources other than the title of the documents and maybe the chapter
names here and there. (Duh! Can you say plagiarism?) Instead, he created
a "special" numbered list of these plagiarized paragraphs in the
References section. The list is not in sequential order of appearance -
he numbered the copied paragraphs with C or P (standing for COBIT or
PCI) preceding the number for example, C1, C2, P1 and P2. Then, he
referenced the "special" numbers in the policy statements, similar to
the way you would number citations to the associated footnotes.
I thought I should add the actual references to the external sources,
but I do not know what to do with the long paragraphs he copied from
those sources. I don't think these should go in the Policy section as
citations. Also, it doesn't make sense to include these as footnotes
since it would create two pages of just footnotes! Should I tell him he
can't include those paragraphs and instead he must only cite the pages
and sections in the external sources?
I have little experience on writing policies or even bibliographies, so
I would appreciate any suggestions or advice on this subject matter from
my fellow writers.
Thanks in advance! :)
Brittany
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