ISNAD Citation Style (Arabic) ISNĀD Niẓām tawthīq al-marājiʻ

There are more than 6,000 bibliographic styles around the world. The most common academic writing and citation styles have emerged since the beginning of the 20th century. Chicago style (The Chicago Manual of Style, CMOS, CMS) was introduced by the University of Chicago in 1906, and its 17th edition was released in 2017. The APA style (The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, APA) was published in 1952, and the 7th edition was released in 2019. 

Styles such as Chicago and APA are guidelines for academic publication in English. Students or academics can access the full texts of these styles in English by purchasing the book format or subscribing to their university's electronic versions. A fee is required for both access options. Therefore, access to the full texts of these styles is not common except in Western countries.

It is also an option to use styles such as Chicago and APA if they have translations such as Turkish and Arabic. However, even translations of earlier editions of these styles are on sale as a commercial products and are not freely available. The styles, such as Chicago and APA, are updated, and new editions are made available over time. The current version of the APA, the 7th edition, was published in English with 428 pages in 2019, and the 17th edition of Chicago was published in 2017 with 1144 pages in English. As of August 2022, they do not have translations into other languages. Even if translated, students can only access their full texts by purchasing them.

Researchers who submit their work to an institute or a journal requesting the use of Chicago and APA styles usually prepare their studies by looking at the examples of one of the different editions they find on the internet. In this case, researchers are often unaware of which editions of Chicago style, which has 17 editions, or APA, which has seven editions, they are looking at. Suppose universities mandate the use of styles such as Chicago and APA in dissertation writing. In this case, universities that require these styles should subscribe to them, like European and US universities, and offer them free of charge to their students. However, access to their English texts will not be a complete solution. These studies prepared to write academic texts in English will need to be translated into Arabic or Turkish and made available to students. Whenever these styles are available to students and researchers in full text, awareness will increase that Chicago and APA styles do not only contain 3-5 pages of information in the footnote and bibliography.

These styles contain all the basics from A to Z that students and researchers must know about academic research and writing. Therefore APA's English has 428 pages, and Chicago style has 1144 pages. Styles such as Chicago and APA cannot be learned correctly by students due to the difficulty of accessing the full English texts of these styles and the translations of their current editions. The negative consequences of this are suffered by advisors, editors, and publishers who have to check and correct academic texts. Due to the lack of knowledge of academic writing and citation, academic ethical violations can be made by students and researchers without even being aware. To eliminate all these negativities, the ISNAD Citation System was developed with the project support of Sivas Cumhuriyet University in 2018.

ISNAD is a Turkey-based academic writing and citation system developed in Turkish for use in scholarly studies. Access to the full text and web version of ISNAD is entirely free. English, Arabic, and Persian translations of ISNAD are also available free of charge. It will also be translated into Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and other Turkish languages. ISNAD; It can also be used with citation management tools such as Zotero, EndNote, and Citavi.

Universities, publishers, and researchers can use ISNAD free of charge, which is offered with an open-access license. ISNAD is more accessible to students and easier to learn. Citation styles differ according to the discipline. In disciplines that use up-to-date data, such as questionnaires and interviews, it is preferred to cite (in-text system) by specifying the publication date immediately after the author's surname. In branches of science that consider it necessary to reach the oldest written source, such as manuscripts, archive documents, and classical works, it is practiced to specify the source name after the author's name (system with footnotes). ISNAD has both in-text and footnote versions. However, in the academic texts written in both versions, the works are written in the same order and format in the bibliography. Therefore, ISNAD is suitable for all branches of science. Preparing the bibliography in a single format allows the bibliography data to be presented as “clean data.” Accepting ISNAD as a reference system by universities and journals will also contribute to the standardization of academic writing. Thus, “clean metadata” will be provided to academic databases and indexes using bibliographic data. ISNAD will continue to be developed with the opinions and suggestions of academicians and researchers and will remain accessible free of charge.