Citations, Terms & Sources
Based at Virginia Tech, this digital publication and archive was produced by thousands of volunteer citizen-archivists, dozens of specialists and scholars, and several cultural and educational institutions. It contains records and datasets created by the US Army during the war, but also contemporary essays and other website content written by historians and other project partners.
Assigning authorship that faithfully accounts for the many people, past and present, involved in its making is impossible. Still, to conform to prevailing practices, we offer the following style guide for citing the website and its constituent elements. For a more complete list of contributors, please visit Project Team & Partners.
Our enterprise is based on a shared commitment to providing free access to as much data and other materials as possible. See our Terms of Use below for how, in this spirit, we have applied Creative Commons licenses across the site. However you use or reuse what you discover, we ask that you kindly acknowledge the labor that has provided you and the rest of the public access to this unique wartime collection and digital publication.
The Chicago Manual of Style has served as our guide in creating the following citations. Users should feel free to adjust to other commonly used styles, such as MLA and APA, replacing placeholder text—italicized words that appear in brackets—with information specific to the citation. Suggested citations to essays and research guides can be found at the bottom of each page.
Citations
Project Website
Gitre, Edward J.K. et al. The American Soldier in World War II. Virginia Tech, 2021. https://americansoldierww2.org. Accessed [date].
Surveys
Survey Free Responses
Respondent [file title]. [survey]: [questionnaire], [date]. Directed by Samuel A. Stouffer for the Research Branch, Information and Education Division, War Department [producer]. Edward J.K. Gitre et al. The American Soldier in World War II, Virginia Tech [distributor], 2021. [URL for free response]. Accessed [date].
Sample citation:
Respondent 33-1046. Survey 106: Post-War Army Plans (Officers and EM): EM Pretest B4 Form, June 1944. Directed by Samuel A. Stouffer for the Research Branch, Information and Education Division, War Department [producer]. Edward J.K. Gitre et al. The American Soldier in World War II, Virginia Tech [distributor], 2021. https://americansoldierww2.org/surveys/a/SP106EB4.Q63.F.15926722. Accessed 12 October 2021.
Survey Datasets
[survey]: [questionnaire], [date]. Directed by Samuel A. Stouffer for the Research Branch, Information and Education Division, War Department [producer]. Edward J.K. Gitre et al. The American Soldier in World War II, Virginia Tech [distributor], 2021. [URL for survey]. Accessed [date].
Sample citation:
Survey 106: Post-War Army Plans (Officers and EM): EM Pretest B4 Form, June 1944. Directed by Samuel A. Stouffer for the Research Branch, Information and Education Division, War Department [producer]. Edward J.K. Gitre et al. The American Soldier in World War II, Virginia Tech [distributor], 2021. https://americansoldierww2.org/surveys/s/S106/q-8/tab-1. Accessed 12 October 2021.
Topics
[author]. “[essay title].” The American Soldier in World War II. Edited by Edward J.K. Gitre. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 2021. [URL for essay]. Accessed [date].
Sample citation:
Adler, Jessica L. “Medical Care & Mental Health.” The American Soldier in World War II. Edited by Edward J.K. Gitre. Virginia Tech, 2021. https://americansoldierww2.org/topics/medical-care-and-mental-health. Accessed 12 October 2021.
Learn
Lesson Plans
Brabble, Jessica. “[lesson plan].” The American Soldier in World War II. Edited by Edward J.K. Gitre. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 2021. [URL for lesson plan or project website]. Accessed [date].
Sample citation:
Brabble, Jessica. “Assignment, Training & Discipline.” The American Soldier in World War II. Edited by Edward J.K. Gitre. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 2021. https://americansoldierww2.org. Accessed 12 October 2021.
Working with the Data
Hughes, Michael, and Edward J.K. Gitre. “How to Work with the Data.” The American Soldier in World War II. Edited by Edward J.K. Gitre. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 2021. https://americansoldierww2.org/how-to-work-with-the-data. Accessed 12 October 2021.
The Surveys & Data
Edward J.K. Gitre. “About the Surveys and Data.” The American Soldier in World War II. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 2021. https://americansoldierww2.org/about-the-surveys-and-data. Accessed 12 October 2021.
Terms of Use
All of the content on this site is open access with Creative Commons licenses. Our goal in doing this was to encourage users and researchers to reuse this work to expand upon the research. Some content falls under different licenses due to the nature of the work. The site as a whole is CC BY 4.0, for general reuse and attribution. The data is CC 0 or public domain as it was originally collected by the government and all government data falls under this license. Finally, the essays on this site are CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 to keep the essays openly available but to limit changes to the authors’ work.
Website (general)
This site is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Under this license you are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format;
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
With the CC BY 4.0 license, you must:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
However, there are no additional restrictions. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Free Responses, Survey Datasets, and Associated Codebooks and Documentation Available for Download
The survey datasets and associated documentation on this site are in the public domain, CC0, as they were collected and produced by the US Federal government or were created under Federal government contract. CC0 allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, with no conditions.
Topics Essays and Research Guides
The contextual essays under Topics and the research guides under Learn written by subject specialists for this site are licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Under this license you are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
With the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, you must:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
- NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
However, there are no additional restrictions. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Sources
The selection of images and media for this website was guided by the project's commitment to open access. A secondary preference was for images and media produced by the US War Department and other federal agencies. Most source credits are located in captions that appear underneath an embedded image, though for illustrated navigation cards the image source will appear at the bottom of the landing page.
Source credits for illustrations on navigation cards, like this example, which takes a user to the Topics essay Discipline & Military Justice, will appear at the bottom of the navigation card's landing page. E.g.:
COVER IMAGE: “The Corps of Military Police,” Newsmap 3, no. 44 (19 February 1945). Information & Education Division, Army Service Forces, War Department. Courtesy of NARA, 26-NM-3-44b, NAID 66395302.
The US War Department reorganized itself multiple times during the war. To mitigate these organizational complexities, which are reflected in the accession of records by the National Archives after the war, minimalist citations are used across the site for illustrations. Links are provided, however, for all digitized records available through the National Archives Catalog.
The majority of illustration are based on Newsmap, a visual digest of war news produced by the Army Orientation Course, Special Service Division, Army Service Forces (volumes 1 and 2), then by the Information & Education Division, Army Service Forces, which was the parent organization of the Research Branch. Newsmap was distributed weekly to military camps, bases, fields, and posts stateside and overseas to be posted on bulletin boards or other public display areas for servicemembers to read.
Volumes of The American Soldier (1949-50) are provided courtesy of the Social Science Research Council and HathiTrust.
High-resolution color scans of What the Soldier Thinks are provided courtesy of the George C. Marshall Research Library.