How to cite and reuse

First, a request: cite the document, not us

If what you are carrying into the room is a regulation, a state rule, an ordinance or a study, cite that. Its full citation and its address are printed on the page you found it on and indexed at Documents cited, and a citation to the instrument itself is stronger in every setting that matters than a citation to a website that quotes it. The whole method of this publication is to make itself unnecessary at the moment of use.

Cite us for the work that is actually ours: a keyword scan and its method, a citation chain traced hop by hop, a register row and its status, a cost model and its assumptions, a reading of a provision that we have labelled as a reading. Those are claims we are answerable for, and they are the ones that should carry our name.

The citation string, in two registers

Every page here carries a ready-made citation string at its foot, in the form below. Both registers use the same three facts: the page’s title, the date printed as Last reviewed in its metadata block, and your own access date.

Full, for a reference list

Hitchcox Z. How to cite and reuse. The Operative Sentence. 2026-08-06. https://biodrainmedical.com/cite/ (accessed 2026-08-06).

In line, for a footnote or a slide

The Operative Sentence, “How to cite and reuse,” 2026-08-06, biodrainmedical.com/cite/

If your house style is numbered and biomedical, the full form above will sit inside it without editing. If it is author-date, the author is Hitchcox and the year is the year of the Last reviewed date. There is no issue number, no volume and no version number in the citation, because this publication is not an instrument of record and does not pretend to be one; the version number lives in the page’s metadata block and belongs in a citation only when the version is the point.

Standing pages like this one carry no metadata block. Their date is the date of their entry in the change log, which is where any later revision to them is recorded as well.

Which date to use, and why there are three of them

Every article and register carries three dates in its metadata block, and they mean different things.

• Published is the day the page first appeared. It never changes.
• Last reviewed is the day a human last re-read the page against its own sources. It moves only when that has actually happened, including when the re-reading changed nothing. This is the date to cite. It is the one that tells your reader how old the checking is, rather than how old the writing is.
• Next review is a commitment, not a decoration. If it has passed and Last reviewed has not moved, the page is overdue and you are entitled to treat it as such.

Add your own access date as well. On a page whose subject is state and municipal law it is not a formality: rules get renumbered, and the access date is what lets a later reader work out which numbering you were looking at.

Citing a register row, a claims-ledger row or a table

Every row in the three registers and in the claims ledger has its own permanent anchor, shown in the row and appended to the page address, so that you can send someone to the row rather than to the page. A row is cited exactly like a page, with two substitutions: the row’s anchor is added to the address, and the row’s own last checked date is used in place of the page’s.

Rows are never deleted. A superseded row is struck through, dated and left in place with its replacement beneath it, so an anchor you cited in a document that outlives the rule will still land somewhere that explains what happened. The same applies to whole pages: a superseded page keeps its address and gains a notice pointing forward.

Tables are numbered and each one carries a source line beneath it. If you reuse a table, bring the source line with it. A table of ours without its source line is exactly the kind of free-floating figure that this publication exists to trace, and we would rather not be the origin of the next one.

What you may reuse

Our own prose, tables and diagrams are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. You may copy, republish, translate, adapt and build on them, including commercially, without asking. What the licence requires in return is attribution and honesty about changes.

An attribution that satisfies it contains four things: the title of the page, the author, a link to the page, and a link to the licence — plus a note saying so if you changed anything. For example:

“How to cite and reuse” by Zane Hitchcox, The Operative Sentence, https://biodrainmedical.com/cite/, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Adapted: shortened and re-set as a handout.

You may not add restrictions of your own to what you take, and you may not imply that we endorse you, your employer, your product or your conclusion. That second one is not merely a licence term here. This publication does not recommend, rank or endorse any device, system, method, vendor or service, and a reuse implying otherwise misrepresents it.

What is not ours to license

• Quoted government text. The regulations, statutes, codes, ordinances, letters of interpretation and agency guidance quoted here are in the public domain. Our licence does not touch them and does not need to. Take them freely, and take them from the issuing body rather than from us where you can.
• Third-party quotations. Passages quoted from journal articles, reports and other copyrighted works remain their authors’ and their publishers’. Our quotation of a passage is not a licence for your republication of it; cite the original and, if you are reproducing more than a quotation, ask its publisher.
• Standards that are sold rather than published. Some of the documents most relevant to operating-room practice are copyrighted standards their publishers sell. We do not reproduce their text anywhere on this site, so there is none of it here to reuse.
• Names and marks. Company names and trademarks that appear on this site are used to refer to their owners and their products by name, and nothing here grants any right in them.

Translating, mirroring and archiving

All three are permitted by the licence and all three are welcome. If you translate a page, say that it is a translation and whose it is; if a translated sentence and ours disagree, ours is the one we are answerable for, and we would like to hear about the disagreement.

Mirroring is easy here by design. Every page is a single hand-written HTML file with one stylesheet and no scripts, no build step and no third-party requests, which means a copy of the file is a working copy of the page. We would rather this material survived in somebody else’s archive than went the way of most of the material we had to trace to write it. If you mirror a page, please keep the date lines and the source lines, and please point back at the address here so that a reader can find out whether it has since been corrected.

If a page changes after you have cited it

Addresses are stable. Pages are not deleted, and a page that is superseded keeps its address. What changes is written down: factual errors at Corrections, permanently and newest first, and every substantive revision in the change log, with what changed and why.

So a citation made today remains resolvable, and a reader following it can establish for themselves whether the sentence you quoted is still the sentence there. That is the whole of what we can promise, and it is more than we were able to get from most of the material we had to trace.

If you have cited something here in a policy, a submission or a published paper and it turns out to be wrong, tell us at corrections@biodrainmedical.com. A correction that arrives from someone who relied on the error is the most useful kind there is, and it will be published with or without your name, as you prefer.