It’s that time of year when a new crop of students arrive for this first semester, joining the others who are returning to continue or finish their degrees. And one of the first things that they’ll encounter in their course outlines and instructions for essays are will be guidelines about academic honesty and correct citation style for their written work.
Institutions invest a significant amount of resources (time, processes, tutoring, disciplinary actions, and print and web resources) on this – and there are some really good materials out there. For example, University of Auckland – Referencite.
That said, I have some sympathy with the sentiment expressed in this article, which argues that getting the exact form of citations right at the expense of developing critical engagement with material might be detrimental. Note that the article doesn’t say you don’t need citations or acknowledging sources, just that the quest for the perfectly formatted bibliography might take a back seat for a bit.
See: Citation Obsession? Get Over It! – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education
Nick Thompson
I (almost) wholeheartedly agree with this article. I think the only principle worth knocking into undergraduate students’ heads is that citations should be unambiguous and clear enough to allow the reader to fact-check.
We would do much better to focus on teaching them how to argue well and write persuasively.
Tim Bulkeley
Amen. The citation Nazis have simply replaced the neat handwriting Nazis now trhat we have computers and printers… I wonder what comes next once Zotero and WorldCat get a bit better and “correct citation” becomes trivial?
Mark
I certainly agree that obsessive attention to this is not just time wasting but destroys student confidence.
I would say the argument is a little simplistic “Citation contents are virtually the same across styles and disciplines: author’s name(s), title(s), publication information.” if you take into account many new media, website, blog, emails, youtube whatever,
what comes next … https://www.academicintegrity.auckland.ac.nz/