Citing for Academic Writing
One of my first takeaways from this week’s readings about proper citations is when to cite versus when not to cite. Most of the information that I read seemed to me to be no-brainer information. However, there were two statements that struck me as new. The first was making sure to cite something that is highly debatable. Using evidence to back up a debatable claim is an easy way to gain the reader’s trust. While reading this, it made sense to me, but I was a little floored that it wasn’t something I had really paid much attention to before. Since most research I’ve encountered is usually experimental research backed up by the facts unveiled by the experiment, I hadn’t really considered other forms of debatable information and how they might be presented in a research article. In fact, a highly debatable claim may be backed up by logical strings of thoughts pulled together from other valid and respected sources and cited within the paper to add credibility to the debatable claim. No experiments are conducted in this case, however related pieces of information are woven together to make sense of a claim and build trust in the reader.
The other citation statement that stuck out to me was about making sure not to cite for common knowledge. This makes sense to me, especially when you’ve been writing and reading collections of similar research for a long time. This would be one of those areas that I would feel nervous about navigating in my first few attempts at writing research articles, especially if I didn’t know what was necessarily considered common knowledge in my work. However, the readings this week provided relief in saying that if you don’t know, it is best just to go ahead and cite it anyway.
My second takeaway this week was around how to present your own thoughts in research articles. A research article isn’t just a compilation of other people’s work, it is an analysis of others’ work combined with the author’s synthesis with their own thoughts and connections. In wrapping my head around this, I found it very helpful to see a breakdown of some questions that can help the author insert their ideas more fluidly into the analysis of cited works. The three questions were “What parts of them do you agree with?” “What parts of them do you disagree with?” and “Did they leave anything out?” I really like these questions, because they are general enough to apply to any research situation and they are open-ended.