This post begins a series that aims to give students some new perspective on citation & referencing. If you're getting started with your Winter semester, following along will be useful to (a) getting acquainted with or refreshing on citation and (b) re-conceptualizing citation as a tool that can boost your critical thinking and writing.
Before reading on, take a minute to consider what you dislike most about academic writing.
I’m willing to bet that near the top of your list is having to cite and reference your sources (from here on, I’ll use “citation” to refer to the larger process of citation and referencing). I’m not here to convince you that this part of writing is actually more fun than you think. Let's be honest: citation seems tedious because it is tedious—particularly if you’re just getting started. It also offer much in the way of intrinsic reward. While the nerdiest among us might take pleasure in re-reading a nicely worded sentence, few reasonable people have ever joyously goggled at the sight of a perfectly formatted citation.
When a necessary academic procedure feels like a chore, it helps to have good reasons for doing it. As it happens, however, students often haven’t been offered, or haven’t reflected much on, good reasons for citation.
Good reasons can get one through the worst of academic drudgery. For instance, although nursing and pre-med students often find the memorization of human anatomy to be a grueling process, it’s obvious that learning the structure of the body is a requirement of their future careers. Awareness of a clear and true purpose—in particular, a purpose of personal relevance—can be enough for students to push forward with the most arduous of tasks.
Like medical professionals’ knowledge of anatomy, career academics across numerous fields of study (e.g., philosophers; research psychologists) must know how to cite effectively. Of course, the wide majority of post-secondary students won't be sticking with academia. For most students, then, learning the writing conventions of a particular discipline doesn’t serve as a sufficient reason to practice good citation. It may pass as a reason, sure—just not a very good one.
What are students supposed to be gaining from this painstaking process? College and university library sites often outline for students a set of standard reasons for citation. They tend to look something like this:
Citation allows people who read your work to find, check, and use the original information sources.
Citation extends credit to the original authors for the work they’ve done.
Citation helps the writer to avoid plagiarism.
Together, these reasons reflect the importance of citation in written works that are released into academic and/or scientific communities. Keeping these reasons in mind is not entirely a bad idea (particularly the point on plagiarism). However, giving at least reasons 1 and 2 some further thought will show you that they're not there for students—these reasons are for academics who are engaging with a community of scholars. Consider the second of the three, for example. This one's highly relevant to scientists. Scientists are writing for a broader community of scholars and must meet the demands of a reward structure in which researchers expect to be acknowledged for their work. It is a core part of the scientific process to acknowledge through citation when you're using another's ideas or building on their work.
The student's context, by contrast, looks very different. Students are not writing for some larger academic community—their writing is generally only seen by their professor or a teaching assistant. Extending credit to the authors whose work you're using in a course paper is largely futile. There's virtually no chance anyone will see your work. In short, if extending credit to the scholars whose work you're using is your reason to cite, you're largely play-acting.
We need a reason for effective use of citation that is more relevant—and more personally meaningful—to the student context. That reason exists, but is rarely made explicit.
I suggest a shift in thinking that moves the purpose of citation away from the scholarly community—which is extremely unlikely to see your work—and toward the advancement of your own learning. Simply stated, citation can be re-framed as a valuable device that you can add to your critical thinking toolbox. This shift toward seeing citation as a writer-oriented rather than—or, better yet, in addition to—a reader-oriented process imbues the process with personal relevance to you as a student and, hopefully, changes how you use citation for the better.
Of course, it won't do at all just to say we’re going to re-frame citation as a critical thinking tool and leave it at that. Good citation can help you check the clarity, accuracy, and logic of your thought and expression. But it won't do so unless you harness it effectively. To do that, we'll need to look closely at how citation can become useful in this way.
The next post in this series will take a brief step back to set forth a primer on citation and referencing for those who need it before moving forward. Part 3 will look at some ideas for re-framing of the citation process as a critical thinking tool. The aim is not to supplant the standard reasons for citation, but to add to them, articulating how we can get to a richer, more individually meaningful perspective on a part of the writing process that is generally viewed merely as a chore.
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