Citations

Citations are notes and references that a researcher makes in a book, article, or similar work to indicate the source of thoughts, research, or theories that are not their original work. These notes can be made in the main body of the work (in-text citations), at the end of each page (footnotes), or at the end of each chapter or the work as a whole (endnotes). The various sources cited in a work are typically also listed at the end of a work in a "works cited" or "bibliography" section. Citations are important because they allow authors to build on one another’s work without either intentionally or inadvertently plagiarizing someone else’s writing or ideas.

Brief History

Historically, citations were brief mentions of an author or text. For example, a scholar might say, "In the Rhetoric, Aristotle outlines the qualities of his three argumentative proofs." Someone listening to this scholar’s lecture would then know to consult a copy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric to learn more about the topic. However, as more scholars began to publish, it became difficult to know whom a scholar was referencing without additional information. Even when the source was well known, such as in the example of Aristotle, it was still difficult to know which translation the scholar had consulted. To solve this problem, academic groups and universities have developed systems of citation.

The format of a citation varies depending on the system used. Systems may be specific to certain academic disciplines, institutions, or publications. This means that while citations have been streamlined, there is no single, objectively right way to reference an author or text in academic writing. Among the most common professional citation systems are those devised by the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Sociological Association (ASA), the Associated Press (AP), and the Modern Language Association (MLA). The most commonly used university systems come from the University of Chicago and Oxford University. While there is no universal agreement as to which system should be used, many academic disciplines have expressed a preference for a specific one, based on both tradition and which information the preferred system prioritizes.

What is common among citation systems is that each requires a writer to provide enough information for the reader to find the full text of the original work. This often includes the name of the author or authors, the title of the work, the page numbers of the information being cited, the year of publication, and the name and location of the publisher. Historically, the publisher’s location was critical, as a copy of a text printed in London might be different from the same text printed in Nairobi; however, as this practice has become less common, the city of publication may no longer be required, depending on the citation system used.

The organization behind each citation system publishes a guide for producing accurate citations. These guides are periodically updated to account for changes in text formats. For example, after X (formerly known as Twitter) emerged as a social media platform in the mid-2000s, each citation system published an update that instructed scholars how to accurately cite a tweet.

Because citations are formulaic constructions, always following the same format with minimal variations, many online databases provide the option to generate preformatted citations for books and journal articles in the user’s preferred system. Some word-processing programs, such as Microsoft Word, also have integrated tools to produce citations. By the 2020s, the increased accessibility and advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) software, such as ChatGPT, meant that some also employed this technology in creating a list of works cited. However, it remained important to manually check these preformatted citations, as they occasionally contain errors.

Citations Today

The availability of published works on the internet has had radical implications for the practice of citation. Because it is easier to access information, writers have been able to include more obscure or more global perspectives in their works. However, the ability to access information quickly has also resulted in the temptation among some scholars and students to copy and paste text directly from websites into the body of their own writing. Copying someone else’s text without providing an accurate citation is plagiarism. This is a violation of academic integrity because the writer is presenting someone else’s research and writing as their own. Plagiarism is often a punishable offense resulting in expulsion from a class or university, loss of a job, or removal of a text from publication. Sometimes plagiarism is caught because a reader is familiar with the original texts and recognizes the wording used. Other times, plagiarism is caught through analytical software tools used by many universities and publishers that automatically compare a submitted text to all texts available on the internet.

The availability of published works on the internet has also changed the ways that citations are formatted. In the early days of internet access, scholars debated if they needed to note whether a cited source was read online or in print. These debates resulted in some citation systems requiring the writer to indicate the medium of the original source. For example, through the seventh edition of the MLA’s style manual, citations were required to note at the end whether the sources consulted were in print, online, or in some other medium. However, the increasing availability of printed information online—through book-archiving websites such as Project Gutenberg and Google Books, large aggregated databases, and online or open-access scholarly journals, among others—raised new questions about whether this information is significant. Accordingly, the eighth edition of the MLA style manual dropped the requirement to note the medium.

Scholars have also debated how to cite websites and web pages such as blogs. While these resources often contain relevant information, that information might not be permanently accessible if the page consulted is deleted, edited, blocked from public view, or moved to a new address without redirecting visitors from the old one. As citations are given so that other readers can find and consult the source material, their purpose is defeated if that source material might disappear at any time. In acknowledgment of this risk, many citation systems require that citations of online materials include two dates: the date the material was originally posted, and the date that the writer consulted that material. This allows readers to know not only where the information came from but also when it was accessible. It is additionally often recommended that writers save copies of online material that is relevant to their research, either as physical printouts or as portable document format (PDF) files, so that a stable copy is available for them to consult for future projects. As more people, including students and researchers, began using generative AI in their work, debates also persisted on how to acknowledge and cite AI systems referenced amid further plagiarism concerns.

Bibliography

The Chicago Manual of Style. 18th ed., U of Chicago P, 2024.

Lipson, Charles. Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success. 3rd ed., U of Chicago P, 2018.

MLA Handbook. 9th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2021.

Nolan, Donald, and Sandra Meredith, editors. OSCOLA: The Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities. 4th ed., Hart, 2012.

Posner, Richard A. The Little Book of Plagiarism. Pantheon, 2007.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. 7th ed., American Psychological Association, 2020.

"References, Citations and Avoiding Plagiarism: Acknowledging and Referencing AI." University College London, 18 Apr. 2024, library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/referencing-plagiarism/acknowledging-AI. Accessed 22 Aug. 2024.

"Using ChatGPT for Source Citation." Microsoft, 5 May 2023, www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/writing/using-chatgpt-for-source-citation. Accessed 22 Aug. 2024.