As a student citing is important because it shows your reader (or professor) that you have invested time in learning what has already been learned and thought about the topic before offering your own perspective. It is the practice of giving credit to the sources that inform your work. Our definitions of academic integrity, academic misconduct and plagiarism, also give us important reasons for citing the sources we use to accomplish academic research. Here are all the good reasons for citing. Misrepresenting your academic achievements by not giving credit to others indicates a lack of academic integrity. This is not only looked down upon by the scholarly community, but it is also punished. When you are a student this could mean a failing grade or even expulsion from the university. One major purpose of citations is to simply provide credit where it is due. When you provide accurate citations, you are acknowledging both the hard work that has gone into producing research and the person(s) who performed that research. Think about the effort you put into your work (whether essays, reports, or even non-academic jobs): if someone else took credit for your ideas or words, would that seem fair, or would you expect to have your efforts recognized? Providing accurate citations puts your work and ideas into an academic context. They tell your reader that you’ve done your research and know what others have said about your topic. Not only do citations provide context for your work but they also lend credibility and authority to your claims. For example, if you’re researching and writing about sustainability and construction, you should cite experts in sustainability, construction, and sustainable construction in order to demonstrate that you are well-versed in the most common ideas in the fields. Although you can make a claim about sustainable construction after doing research only in that particular field, your claim will carry more weight if you can demonstrate that your claim can be supported by the research of experts in closely related fields as well. Citing sources about sustainability and construction as well as sustainable construction demonstrates the diversity of views and approaches to the topic. In addition, proper citation also demonstrates the ways in which research is social: no one researches in a vacuum—we all rely on the work of others to help us during the research process.To Avoid Plagiarism & Maintain Academic Integrity
To Acknowledge the Work of Others
To Provide Credibility to Your Work & to Place Your Work in Context
To Help Your Future Researching Self & Other Researchers Easily Locate Sources
Having accurate citations will help you as a researcher and writer keep track of the sources and information you find so that you can easily find the source again. Accurate citations may take some effort to produce, but they will save you time in the long run. So think of proper citation as a gift to your future researching self!
In general, you must document sources when you provide information that you ordinarily would not have known before conducting your research, and when you provide information that it cannot be assumed the reader knows. You must cite a reference when you:
- Discuss, summarize, or paraphrase the ideas of an author
- Provide a direct quotation
- Use statistical or other data
- Use images, graphics, videos, and other media
While you are doing research and locating sources, be sure to document materials thoroughly, noting the author, title, publisher, place of publication, date, and page numbers of all sources used. For electronic materials, you should also note the DOI number (Digital Object Identifier) if available. Note the URL of any website you consult; depending on the source, you may need it for the reference.
APA style no longer requires a database name for most references; MLA style still requires it as part of your citation. In either case, make a note of it in case you need to retrieve it at a later date.
Common Knowledge
Things that are common knowledge do not require citation. For example:
- Social networking sites such as Facebook allow people to communicate easily regardless of their location. (does not require citation)
- The Japanese navy attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. (does not require citation)
However, if someone draws an original conclusion from a common fact, then you must cite the source:
- The ability to share real-time news and video with the world via social networking sites has emboldened student movements in countries where there is very little freedom of the press. (requires citation)
- Japan's failure to sink any U.S. aircraft carriers in the otherwise devastating attack on Pearl Harbor assured Japan's eventual defeat. (requires citation)
Also, common sayings or proverbs need not be cited:
- "The early bird gets the worm." (common expression with no distinct origin)
Below is a famous saying you might recognize, but it's actually from a poem by Sir Walter Scott. If you read this in a book, of course, you would cite the book. If you already knew this expression, you should still give Sir Walter Scott credit for it because it has a distinct and identifiable origin.
- "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."
In writing research papers and their evaluation, references or citations play a central role. Knowing the role(s) in detail will help you to cite accurately and responsibly.
Know the definition of referencing here:
What is referencing in academic writing? – a different perspective.
Commonly understood roles of references
According to several top search results, when “role of references in research” is searched in Google, referencing have the following important roles:
- Referencing allows you to acknowledge or give credit to the writers and researchers from whom you have borrowed words and ideas, thereby avoiding plagiarism.
- Referencing is a way to provide evidence to support the assertions and claims in your own assignments.
- References allow readers to trace the sources of information you have used.
However, these commonly understood roles don’t clearly reflect the deeper impact (as listed below) references make on the research paper itself and science overall.
References (summarised from here):
- demonstrate the foundation of the study.
- support the novelty and value of the study.
- link one study to others creating a web of knowledge that carries meaning.
- allows researchers to identify work as relevant in general and relevant to them.
- create values that are internal to science (e.g., relevance, credit).
- create values that are external to science (e.g., provide avenues to determine accountability and researchers or funding performance).
A wrong perception of referencing
According to many search results, the most common role of referencing is to acknowledge or give credit to other researchers. This creates a wrong perception among authors that they need to cite references neutrally without constructive scientific evaluation (praise or criticism). No wonder an editorial published in Nature genetics reported that neutral, flavourless or unexamined citations frequently occur in research articles and supporting or contradictory publications are rarely cited. This is an increasing problem for the integrity of scientific communication.
This situation can be improved by acknowledging that referencing is not a neutral act but a political act (without bad politics). In fact, acknowledging the political nature of referencing is a vital rule for responsible referencing. For more on responsible referencing, see here.
But why referencing is a political act?
By assessing many research articles, you select the articles you want to cite and discard others. To pose the research questions and support the claims and novelty of your research work, rather than neutral representations of the references, you accurately represent, inflate, or deflate the contributions of other researchers’ works. See the following examples.
Example 1: Using references to establish the research question.
Many of us have encountered instances where the support of an assertion by the cited reference proves to be ambiguous, non-existent, or even contradictory (often we only notice this when our own work has been mis-cited!). A related practice is the citing of “empty” references (Harzing 2002), also known as “lazy author syndrome” (Gavras 2002), where the citation actually attributes a finding or an opinion to a secondary source such as a review paper, editorial, etc. But how pervasive is citation malpractice and how can it be controlled?
SOURCE: Tood, Yeo, Li, and Ladle, Oikos 116, 1599 (2007)
Example 2: Using references to support claim and novelty of the research paper.
We found that the original assertion was “clearly supported” by the citation in 76.1% of the cases; the support was “ambiguous” in 11.1% of the cases; and the citation did “not support” the original statement in 7.2% of the cases. The remaining 5.6% of the cases were classified as “empty”. How do these mis-citation rates compare with other disciplines? A number of biomedical studies have used an approach similar to our own, although they applied the analogous categories “major error” and “minor error” rather than “no support” and “ambiguous”. Combined error rates found by Fenton et al. 2000 (17%) and Lukic et al. 2004 (19%) are comparable to our result of 18.3% for “no support” plus “ambiguous”, though other results for medical journals range from 12.3% (Gosling et al. 2004) to 35.2% (Goldberg et al. 1993). To our knowledge, empty citation data are absent for all the sciences.
SOURCE: Tood, Yeo, Li, and Ladle, Oikos 116, 1599 (2007)
Conclusion
Appreciation of the broader roles of referencing and its political nature will enable researchers and scientists to produce research works by making citations accurately.
Does your reference manager support you in demonstrating how accurately you represented other researchers’ contributions in your research work? For the first time, with nXr.iCite you can search quotes/images; make citations based on quotes/images and share all the cited materials with your mentors/reviewers for peer-review. This enables them to validate your research paper with the content of the references side-by-side without leaving the paper.
//nxref.com