Why we need to reference

Earlier this year I completed a MOOC on the FutureLearn platform, and got to a week which was focused on referencing. Such a great topic.

But what surprised me was that this week's work did not start with the reasons to reference - which I am quite passionate about - but rather with what can happen to us if we try to cut corners. I felt that this somewhat put the cart before the horse, so to speak.

If we follow Simon Sinek's advice, selling people the 'why' (Sinek, 2010) is a key to effective action.

I see the five main reasons for showing the bones of our thinking via citations and references as:

1. Integrity. Integrity is about using other's work as intended by the original author and citing their words, images, and IP when touched or in passing, when expanded or alluded to within our own work. If I use other's words verbatim, I quote, using double quotation marks and including a page number if it is from a numbered document, so that others can see where I "Stand on the shoulders of giants (GoogleScholar, 2023; after Newton, 1686, citing Bernard of Chartres, 1189; Wikiquote, 2023).
   
2. Honour. When we honour another's effort and ideas, we can then add our bit on top of theirs. It enables each of us to "Stand on the shoulders of giants" (GoogleScholar, 2023; after Newton, 1686, citing Bernard of Chartres, 1189; Wikiquote, 2023).
3. Honesty. The practice above shows that we are honest. We don't claim others’ work as ours, therefore any unreferenced work is our own.
4. Understanding. Referencing and citing shows that we understand our own field; we know who the experts are, and can draw upon them. It also shows our work is robust and can be relied upon, because we have our finger so on the pulse on what is new and emerging in our field. Being clear about what is coming is also an indicator that our work is robust, scholarly, and reliable.
5. Challenge. By being transparent in sharing my sources with my reader, I can be further challenged in my ideas, and so become academically stronger. I don't hide who I am reading: I share it openly, and show that I am open to challenge, discourse, and development. This enables me to 'see further' - a little further, anyway - from those giants who have gone before me.

Five darned good reasons for referencing. 

Sam

References:

GoogleScholar (2023). Home. https://scholar.google.co.nz/

Newton, I. (1686). Standing on the shoulders of giants in a Letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke. http://digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/9285

Sinek, S. (4 May 2010). TED: How great leaders inspire action [video]. https://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4

Wikiquote (2023). Isaac Newton. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

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The 10 point plan for reading journal articles

One of the hardest things students need to get past is the idea that academic journals are too difficult for them to read. In general, I think reading academic writing is simply a matter of technique. 

However, students must have good inputs in order to have good outputs: that is, their academic writing will not improve unless their inputs are of good quality. So to get to the 'right' academic writing standard, they must be reading and processing academic/journal articles. 

In my experience, getting better at reading journal articles is a matter of practice. The more we tackle reading this type of work, the better we get at understanding them. Given the will to apply themselves, I have seen that any student can tackle them. What is often missing is a strategy to approach each piece. To chunk down how much is tackled at any one time. To create familiarisation. To not try to eat the entire elephant at once (Gilbert, 1992).  

I suggest that students new to reading academic materials begin to build their 'muscles' by tacking articles in the following way:

1. Read the abstract. 
2. Then read the conclusion. 
3. Then come back and read the introduction. 
4. If - after reading these three elements - there is nothing that relates to our project, we stop reading. 
5. If the work does relate to what we are doing, then read the discussion. 
6. Lastly, we can review the whole article, including the method. 
7. We make notes from the bits which strongly relate to our work. 
8. We look up the sources for those bits in the reference list ("reference mining"). 
9.  Then when we are looking for our next article, we check out the key words in that article to see if any of them might relate to what we are doing. 
10. We then find the other source articles, and read those articles, following the same format. 

In each section there are a range of questions to ask ourselves: 

• "Does anything apply to my project?"
• "Are there similarities in this work and what I am proposing to do?"
• "Are the participants similar to mine?"
• "Are the results similar to what I am expecting to get?"
• "Is the context similar to my context?"
• "Are the methods similar to my proposed methods?"

If we answer yes to any of the questions above, we make notes from that paper on that section. Then we repeat - we move onto the next source. 

That usually works to get us started.

Sam

References:

Gilbert, J. (1992). How to Eat an Elephant: A slice by slice guide to total quality management. Tudor Business Publishing.

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Why Writing Needs Citations

Each semester, I explain - clearly - to my students why academic writing (assignment work) needs citations and references.

There are some VERY good reasons as to why we should cite - and not just in academic writing. We often think that we can simply reuse something, without crediting who created it. So as a broader community, I think we could be more explicit where we have borrowed things from. With everything.

In my view, there are five key issues at play here: integrity, honour, honesty, understanding, and challenge.

1. To me, integrity in this area is acknowledging another's work, ideas, words, images, concepts and IP when recycled in our work, when touched on in passing, when expanded or alluded to within your own work by citing. And if I use another's words verbatim, then I quote, using double quotation marks to clearly indicate these are another's actual words.
   
   
2. Integrity is also in using another's work as it was intended by the original author.
   
   
3. When we honour another's effort and ideas, we can then add our bit on top of theirs. It enables each of us to "build on the shoulders of giants" - to cite GoogleScholar (after Newton, 1686, citing Bernard of Chartres, 1189; Wikiquote, n.d.). It also shows that we are honest. We don't claim others’ work as ours. And that shows that any unreferenced work is our own creation.
   
   
4. This shows that we understand our own field; we know who the experts are. It also shows our work is robust & can be relied upon, because we have our finger so on the pulse.
   
   
5. In keeping a record of my sources (bibliographic references) and sharing that with my reader, I can be transparent. This allows others to read where my ideas have come from, and to engage me in debate about those ideas. To further challenge me.

However, there is an expansion on this idea of challenge that Christopher Sheldon shared with me on Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996), in a MOOC we both attended in 2015. Christopher related that a "ground breaking" idea which Kuhn "put forward in the book is that [...] research does not necessarily proceed in a logical fashion, each step built on the one before. Instead, he makes a case for the role of such illogical elements in research as culture, social drivers, aesthetics and what looks astonishingly like ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ – although from memory, I don’t think he uses those words" (2015).

"To me, this conjures up a situation where a researcher might either reference other work to indicate how different their own thinking is from the mainstream, or perhaps even finds there are few ‘others’ to quote or reference because their idea is simply not explored by the current academic paradigms" (Sheldon, 2015).

I think that citing, and creating a bibliographic reference list, gives us an opportunity to have a conversation, and to grow.


Sam

References:

• GoogleScholar (n.d.). Home. https://scholar.google.co.nz/
• Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press
• Newton, I. (1686). Standing on the shoulders of giants in a Letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke .http://digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/9285
• Sheldon, C. (2015). FutureLearn: Academic Integrity MOOC [Personal communcation]. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/academic-integrity/4/steps/36157?page=9#comment_6599647
• Wikiquote (n.d.). Isaac Newton. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

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