Citation of different types of sources

Question

In my small research paper (Bachelor level, university of applied sciences) that I'm writing for my internship, I want to make use of certain frames from videos that have been published by the company I'm interning at to showcase their product.

Now I'm wondering how I should go about including the source for the still (and while I'm at it, different materials).

Currently APA is used for all citations, now I'm left wondering how I should incorporate sources such as:

1. A frame from a video (the timestamp might not be accurate enough, considering the video's are 30 frames per second?)
2. Internal documentation/communication/imagery which will never be released to the public
3. screencaptures of 3D models

the question is quite straightforward for source number 1, however, for sources 2 and three it might not be so simple.

Source types 2 & 3 have either a group of authors, no authors mentionned, or a single author. They also are highly confidential, and it is quite a lot of material.

So, my questions are:

• How do I go about citing a specific frame of a video?
• How do I deal with citing confidential information
  • Another consideration is the sheer amount of information, we're talking hundreds of documents, images and videos. Do I actually have to cite each one individually?
• Considering most imagery used in my research will be put in the appendix, with it's own caption, do I need to incorporate the citation part ((company name, author, year)) within the caption? Or how should I handle this?

Answer 1

You can use Microsoft Word on the add reference tab-new source (Im using Word in another language, so the term might vary in english, and click on the extended info. There is an option for multimedia/digital mediums.

1. You dont need to add the specific frame. You cite the entire video and where you retrieved in case it's online (or as movie if its a movie). The reference to the frame or the second where it was paused goes in your text, not your cite or reference (at least not in APA).
2. Cite the manual normally but the author is a corporate author.
3. It's still an image and the citing/reference so t depends where you saw took the screen-cap. You cite is as multimedia/digital medium and rather than 'retrieved from' you can say 'captured from' , otherwise, the normal way works and you ad din your text when describing the image directly as a screen capture.

And yeah... generally you need to cite individually if you are using them individually. You dont need to cite 10000 articles, just the ones you are specifically using. If they form part of a collection then you cite the collection but add the specifics of what you are using. In this case, APA might not be the best citation style, so consider using another one if you are not required to use APA.

Regarding the confidentiality of documents, it is very situational.

For example, there are articles/papers that cite for example a prehispanic codex of which there is only 1 copy in the world and the author has that copy in it's personal library, so it isn't really available for others to revise. However, when it comes to 'confidential docs', if you have permission you can mention it in your text as "Personal Communication", or as the type of document from company X (if you have permission for it) , but the thing about citing is not only to give credit tot he original authors, but to lets other researches be able to peer review your work too.

So, if there's a way to retrieve that confidential doc (like when it is going to be declassified at some point) you can cite is as the type of document it is with a corporate author. If it can't be retrieved/revised by anyone else then just mention it in the text but don't make a reference out of it.