How to Cite

The Detroit Badman Digital Archive is a citable scholarly resource. This page documents how to cite the archive as a whole, how to cite individual figure entries, how to acknowledge primary sources accessed through the archive, and the licensing terms that govern reuse.

Citing the archive as a whole

Use the archive-level citation when referencing the project's scope, methodology, or scholarly apparatus rather than a specific entry.

Citing an individual figure entry

Use the figure-level citation when your argument engages the archive's scholarly framing of a specific figure including the five-criteria evaluation, biography synthesis, network analysis, or source documentation. Each figure page generates its own citation block in all three formats; use those citations directly.

The generic template, with the figure's name substituted:

Citing primary sources accessed through the archive

Primary sources held in the archive such as novels, films, court records, archival collections, and scholarly articles retain their original publication information and should be cited as you would cite them if you had accessed them directly. Scholarly convention recommends acknowledging the access point when it meaningfully affected your engagement with the source (e.g., when you relied on metadata, digitization, or contextualization that only the archive provides).

Each primary source page in the archive generates a citation block for the source itself in all three formats. Use that citation as your base. If you want to acknowledge the archive as your access point, append a phrase to the end of the citation:

Licensing and rights

Archive compilation. The compiled archive including the five-criteria evaluation framework, biography synthesis, network analysis, metadata schema, and editorial apparatus is the original work of Harry M. Foster, 2026. Scholarly quotation and reference are welcome under customary academic fair use. Redistribution of the archive's content as a dataset, a derivative work, or a commercial product requires written permission.

Individual sources. Each primary source retains the rights of its original creators and publishers. The archive links to or describes sources but does not claim rights over them. Citing a source through the archive does not transfer or alter those rights. Users seeking to reproduce, adapt, or redistribute a primary source must work directly with the rights holder documented in the source's metadata.

Community contributions. Submissions to the archive from community members are governed by the terms the contributor set at submission time including anonymization, access level, and permitted uses. Those terms appear on each contributed entry. Users accessing community-contributed material are bound by those terms.

Citation stability. URLs in the form /archive/figures/viewer/?id=[figure_id] and /archive/sources/viewer/?id=[source_id] are intended to be stable and citeable. If an ID is ever renamed, the archive will maintain redirects from the prior URL to the current one.

Questions

For questions about citation, permissions, or licensing not covered above, contact the project director.