Bibliographic reference

Bibliographic reference

Scientific tradition requires that scientists, when documenting their own research, refer to earlier works, which relate to the subject matter of their reported work. These bibliographic references are supposed to identify those earlier researchers whose concepts, theories, methods, equipment, etc. inspired or were used by the author in the process of conducting and presenting his or her own research. On the nature of references in general, the following statements are typical:

“A research paper requires a thoughtful balance between your own language and the words and sentences you borrow from other sources” (Marius & Wiener, 1991, p. 442).

Borrowing from other sources without proper recognition is generally regarded as plagiarism:

“You commit plagiarism whenever you present words or ideas taken from another person as if they were your own […]. The prose we write ourselves is so individual that when we write something in a striking way or express a new idea, we have produced something that always belongs to us. To call someone else’s writing your own is wrong and foolish” (Marius & Wiener, 1991, p. 465).

“Plagiarism can result from not giving credit to the person who thought of an idea, calculated statistics, made a discovery. You cannot pass off as your own another person’s work” (Carter & Skates, 1990, p. 482).

Thus, if one borrows from other sources, one has to credit the sources by citing them. However, not all ideas and discoveries need to be cited. The Scott Foresman Handbook for Writers explains that there is no need to cite:

“facts, dates, events, information, and concepts that belong generally to an educated public. No individual owns the facts about history, physics, social behavior, geography, current events, popular culture, and so on […]. What the experts know collectively constitutes the common knowledge within the field about the subject; what they assert individually – their opinions, studies, theories, research projects, and hypotheses – is the material you must document in a paper” (Hairston & Ruszkiewicz, 1988, p. 546-547).

Though the act of citing is sometimes said to be as old as scholarship itself (e.g., Price, 1963, p. 65), historians of science nevertheless disagree about the origins of this tradition. According to Grafton (1997), historians of science have placed the birth of the modern reference in the twelfth century, the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the nineteenth – never without good reason. Mustelin (1988), however, maintains that authors prior to the sixteenth century often duplicated the work of their predecessors without proper recognition. From the latter part of the sixteenth century, authors of scientific works strived to give their texts a greater evidential weight partly by noting and referring to other sources. Among the proponents of this practice were philologists and text publishers. Historians and others followed later. Nowadays, explicit references are believed to be essential in order to communicate effectively and intelligently about scientific and technical subjects (Garfield, 1977, p. 8), and the act of citing is thus second nature to anyone writing a scholarly or a scientific paper (Kaplan, 1965, p. 179).

In 1970 Derek J. de Solla Price proposed and adopted the convention that “if Paper R contains a bibliographic footnote using and describing Paper C, then R contains a reference to C, and C has a citation from R” (Price, 1970, p. 7). Narin (1976, p. 334, 337) later reiterated Price’s convention by stating that a citation is the acknowledgement one bibliographic unit receives from another whereas a reference is the acknowledgement one unit gives to another.

Literature:

Carter, B. & Skates, C. (1990). The Rinehart Handbook for Writers. Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Garfield, E. (1977). To cite or not to cite: A note of annoyance. Current Contents, 35(August 29): 5–8.

Grafton, A. (1997). The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hairston, M. & Ruszkiewicz, J. J. (1988). The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.

Kaplan, N. (1965). The norms of citation behavior: Prolegomena to the footnote. American Documentation, 16(3), 179–184

McGregor JH & Williamson K (2005). Appropriate use of information at the secondary school level: Understanding and avoiding plagiarism . Library & Information Science Research, 27(4), 496-512.

Marius, R. & Wiener, H. S. (1991). The McGraw-Hill College Handbook. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Mustelin, O. (1988). Källhänvisningar och fotnoter i svenskspräkiga Åbodissertationer under 1700-talet. In Kolding Nielsen, E. et al. (ed.), Bøger, Biblioteker, Mennesker: Et Nordisk Festskrift Tilegnet Torben Nielsen Universitetsbiblioteket i København. København, DK: Det kgl. Bibliotek i samarbejde med Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab: 105-126.

Narin, F. (1976). Evaluative Bibliometrics: The Use of Publication and Citation Analysis in the Evaluation of Scientific Activity. Cherry Hill, NJ: Computer Horizons, Inc.

Price, D.J.S. (1963). Little Science, Big Science. New York, NY: Colombia. University Press.

Price, D. J. S. (1970). Citation measures of hard science, soft science, technology, and nonscience. In: Nelson, C.E. & Pollock, D.K. (eds.), Communication Among Scientists and Engineers. Lexington, MA: Heath: 3–22.

Jeppe Nicolaisen

2005

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