§ 01What a complete credit contains
A good attribution answers four questions: who made it, what it is, where it came from, and on what terms you're using it. For most borrowed material — a photograph, a quoted passage, a dataset — that means: the creator's name, the title of the work, a stable URL or publication detail, and the licence or permission under which you're reproducing it.
The order matters less than the completeness. "Photo by Jane Doe" is better than nothing, but it leaves out where you found it and whether she licensed it for reuse. "Photo: Mountain Light by Jane Doe, via Flickr, CC BY 4.0" is a credit. The Creative Commons community formalised this logic into the acronym TASL — a reliable checklist whatever the medium.
§ 02Where a link falls short
Hyperlinking to a source is courteous, but it isn't attribution. Links break, pages move, and a dead URL carries no information about who created the work or on what terms. For anything that may be archived or printed, write the credit in plain text so it survives without the hyperlink. Where a licence is involved — Creative Commons licences being the most common open licences you'll encounter — naming the specific licence (CC BY 4.0, not just "Creative Commons") protects both creator and user.
For academic or research contexts, full citation style — author, year, title, publisher, DOI or URL, access date — is the expected minimum. In most jurisdictions, proper attribution is also a legal condition of many open licences, not a courtesy: omit it and a permitted use can become an infringing one.
Get the credit right the first time. Correcting attribution after publication is possible; losing the original source details is not.
APPENDIXAttached to the record
| Term | As used in this record |
|---|---|
| Attribution | crediting a creator with the required identifying details of their work |
| CC BY 4.0 | Creative Commons Attribution licence, version 4.0; allows reuse with credit |
| DOI | Digital Object Identifier; a persistent link used in academic citations |
| TASL | Creative Commons attribution checklist for crediting open-licensed works |
Filed as general information, in a precise reference voice — not legal advice.