Citation, the acknowledgment of a statement, ideas, and concept to another writer lends authenticity and authority to academic writing (Glitrow, 2005, p: 14-15). The paper would attempt to explain how citations are signals of authority and authenticity and discuss certain issues and unknown factors related to the use of citations.
Hyland reports that the number of citations reported is increasing steadily and while in 1910 there were 1.5 items in the reference section, by 1980, the figure had grown to 1980 (Hyland, 2004, p. 22-23). According to Glitrow (p: 14-15), citations are used for building up an argument or attempting to prove or disprove a hypothesis and a scholar needs to use content from other works to support the arguments. The process of providing citations takes two different approaches, one where the scholar only repeats the words and ideas of others and two where scholarly citations give a link to authority and a platform for those who have who want to borrow some words and ideas from others. The process of giving citations has been examined as a linguistic area and interpretation of how well or how poorly the words of others are repeated (Glitrow, 2005, p: 14-15). Hyland (2004, p. 20) posits that citation is the key to the social perspective of persuasions as it can rationalize hypotheses and arguments and declare the stand of the scholar when he acknowledges the work of other authors. He contends that the scholar tries to show loyalty to a particular community and creates an oratorical niche for the paper and establishes sincerity. Hyland (2004, p. 20) points out that the ‘discussion’ chapter has become important as it lays the foundation and forms the theoretical basis for further research.
While the authors have detailed the method of citation and how they are structured, the actual use of citation in a research paper is still unknown. By citing multiple sources, the scholar attempts to triangulate the research to focus on his paper and make it more authentic. However, given the wide range of papers quoted over the years, the fact that the hypothesis and result that was true a few years back does not mean that it is true in the current context. Many of the terms and issues such as the Internet, web addiction, and others that have to be addressed did not even exist a few years back and when old network theories are applied to explain social networks such as Orkut, there is a sense of disconnect. The works of Glitrow (2005) and Hyland (2004) would best be useful for a beginner who needs to know how to write citations.
Theoretical constructs formed by literature review can cause a problem when a survey instrument has to be designed based on the literature review. What is also not known is how much of the cited text is actually used in the paper and if the scholar just wants to pad the document by using impressive citations. What is also not known is where do citation end and plagiarism begin. By just paraphrasing the works of others and by skillful use of the word processor, it is possible to beat the best anti-plagiarism software but is this ethical research? Obviously, a study needs to be done on the effective use of citations and the context in which a reference is used. The original authors may have defined a term with a different context while the scholar would just pick up what he wanted without understanding the full context and this type of reckless citation creates problems.
References
- Glitrow Janet (2005). Academic Writing: An Introduction. Broadview Press. Chapters: 2, 9-11.
- Hyland Ken (2004). Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. University of Michigan Press/ESL. Chapter 2.
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