Citing sources rant

[jetriot]

Sorry this is a rant. I thought what better place to post it than the Escapist forums, home of the long winded rant? Why is it that different academic circles/schools/ departments/ employers/etc. feel the the need to have a billion different ways to format citing sources. Chicago, MLA, APA the list goes on. Beyond that there are multiple subways to cite a source in each of the formats(Chicago Style has 4 different styles).

WTF is the point?!? I am back in school for my masters and each class has a different way to cite material and each one treats you like an idiot if you don't do it right. Everyone in academics complains about the US not switching to metric? This is 20 times worse! Even as a libertarian I am at the point where we should make it federal law that we pick one way to cite things that we teach in elementary school and use throughout our lives. Anyone that attempts to introduce a new way to cite sources should get a mandatory life sentence to a maximum security prison.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Finally, a thread that I can relate to!

I too hate the whole authoritarian "YOU MUST DO IT EXACTLY THIS WAY OR YOU'RE A PLAGIARIST" attitude referencing has (especially at university) Our university would mark you down badly if you cited sources incorrectly because they saw it as plagiarism, even if you had put the quote in indented commas to indicate it's a quote, added a number referencing it back to your bibliography, listed the author, book name, publisher, year published, book edition number etc. BUT if something's listed in the wrong order then YOU'RE STEALING OTHER PEOPLE'S WORK! GARRR! It was just ridiculous.

I can understand the need to reference properly, and the seriousness of stealing work, but as long as you list the authors name and the name of the book, maybe include the year, who cares about the order you've listed them, or the location the book was printed in? as long as there is enough information for another person to find the book you quoted and locate the quote all that other restrictive crap they impose is just academical circle-jerking.

 

[IndomitableSam]

Use RefWorks if you can. And if you use EBSCO for your research it'll give you the proper citation for most styles, including the obscure. Also, as I am one... Go see you librarians. They should have books or cheat sheets on how to cite things properly. And can show you RefWorks and the other various wonderful things that make goddam citations earlier.

I hate citations with a fucking passion, too.

 

[McMullen]

That's unfortunate.

My department seems to have decided that everyone in the graduate program has been through that and knows how to write a citation, or will remind themselves after a few proposals or journal submissions have been turned down. They generally let that stuff slide (within reason) and instead focus on the quality of your actual work.

In the last week, I've heard the following in two different classes:

Student: "Do you want the citations to be MLA, APA, or something else?"

Prof: *shrugs* "Doesn't matter."

--------------

Prof: "I'm not going to give you a problem you need a calculator for. I'm assuming you know how to use one by now. I just want to know you can convert this form to that form."

 

[Kopikatsu]

That's unfortunate.

My department seems to have decided that everyone in the graduate program has been through that and knows how to write a citation, or will remind themselves after a few proposals or journal submissions have been turned down. They generally let that stuff slide (within reason) and instead focus on the quality of your actual work.

In the last week, I've heard the following in two different classes:

Student: "Do you want the citations to be MLA, APA, or something else?"

Prof: *shrugs* "Doesn't matter."

--------------

Prof: "I'm not going to give you a problem you need a calculator for. I'm assuming you know how to use one by now. I just want to know you can convert this form to that form."

I want your math Prof so bad.

 

[roushutsu]

Well considering how many people claim copyright infringement over anything these days, I understand the importance and focus on citation. Doesn't make it any less annoying sadly.

 

[Doclector]

To me, the very idea of citing sources is puzzling to me.

So, I need to back up my essay...with someone elses essay, who backed their essay up with someone elses essay...y'see the issue here?

It feels like such a deep empthasis on finding sources for your information punishes people for trying to think of new ideas. I feel there should be more credit for that. Sure, good research makes things more solid, but if we force people to rely on old ideas, we'll never end up with any new ones breaking through.

The referencing systems are worse though. We mostly follow harvard referencing, but a lot of that information is horrifically unneccessary. The city in which the book was published? Really?

 

[burningdragoon]

This seems relevant:


Okay, okay I don't actually know much about citing sources. I guess varying levels of formality make some sense, but otherwise yeah, kinda sucks and doesn't make nearly as much sense as it should.

 

[jetriot]

I don't mind citing. If only there were not so many damn ways to cite. The library does have great resources for citing and I especially like articles that I can copy paste the citation in the format of my choice. The problem comes when I have to use footers and headers and everything else is a specific format that is never included in reference libraries. Beyond that you have to make sure those footers relate to each other in a specific way and there are dozens of rules and exceptions for every little thing.

I also have professors that seem to have their own way of citing as two classes that supposedly use Chicago Style:Name, date, want me to format my footers in completely different ways. When I write a short 5 page essay I swear to God I spend more time with the citations than I do writing the god damned paper!

 

[SckizoBoy]

I can understand the need to reference properly, and the seriousness of stealing work, but as long as you list the authors name and the name of the book, maybe include the year, who cares about the order you've listed them, or the location the book was printed in? as long as there is enough information for another person to find the book you quoted and locate the quote all that other restrictive crap they impose is just academical circle-jerking.

The problem lies in the need to cite different types of publications from one academic field to the other.

I don't know what you're studying, but in physics/chemistry, everyone uses the Vancouver method, but in biology, they use Havard. I really haven't the faintest idea why, but it's probably to do with the way books are updated when original research is released. From the lab to the reference book takes years now in chemistry & physics, so everyone almost purely cites journals, and there tends to be a great deal more of them than for the biological sciences (at least as far as I'm aware, for each of chem/phys just for clarification). For biology, it goes from research to book form more quickly, so referencing comes slightly differently... though that didn't stop me from using Vancouver when I did my master's so... *shrug*

And for history, there's a lot of citing of primary sources which is inconvenient, because you're generally left citing as follows: e.g. Livy Ab Urbe Condita XXIV-14. And that's it. Even ere, I've put in 'AUC' for the sake of example, in reality virtually no-one cites Livy like that. The original text is lost so numbering paragraphs is next to impossible, but that's how it's done. So, it's very difficult to have a reference standard for citation per se.

 

[ramboondiea]

I feel your pain, my university course used two different citation methods, Harvard and Oxford referencing, absolute pain in the arse sometimes, especially when I would have 3-5 pieces of work in around the same time and I had to keep reminding myself how they wanted it, which can be tedious at the best of times with some work having somewhere in the region of 100 references of various sources minimum, probably lost more points then I should to referencing haha.

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

Tell me about it. When I was at University we had to do all this, I think we used the Harvard method. Every time I had to hand in assignments I'd have to look up the guide lines again to make sure I had done it right. Thankfully alot of my assignments where the type that needed only a few or no references.

 

[HardkorSB]

What I found really frustrating in college was that you HAD to cite a certain amount of sources.
If you did all the research, all the experiments, everything yourself and wrote an essay based on that, you failed because the there weren't any citations in it (didn't matter how good the essay was).

 

[Tiger Sora]

I use a form called IEEE in college. It's a simple form to do and I've only one class I need to use it in. Great to be in a tech course.

Still I do say citing is annoying.

 

[In Search of Username]

I just got told I was plagiarising because I cited some of the same sources as someone at Cardiff University (which I have never even been to). I don't understand.

 

[Zantos]

Whenever I cite a paper I hope and pray it's been submitted on arXiv, since you can just be like arXiv: *8 character code*. Apart from that, citing things is the only thing I find more stressful than writing it. Luckily when I was an undergrad everyone was so bad at referencing that as long as there was some sort of approved referencing system that was enough, regardless of mixing, matching and making up.

 

[kyuzo3567]

The only upside is once you're in a specific field it tends to stay the same... Im a Psych major so everything I do is APA format... my word document default is actually APA format now just cuz of all the papers I write... But it gets annoying when you're required to take other courses outside your field (i.e histories or sciences) so in University withing the past year i've had to use APA, MLA, Chicago, and CSE style, all within a single semester so that made me want to tear my hair out

 

[Blackdoom]

Doing a chemistry degree the only thing I ever need to reference is a reference book and we don't need to use any specific system. I know that other people at my university have to use Harvard Referencing but all I need to do is put the page number as everyone in the chemistry part know what I am referring to.

 

[DoPo]

To me, the very idea of citing sources is puzzling to me.

So, I need to back up my essay...with someone elses essay, who backed their essay up with someone elses essay...y'see the issue here?

Man, it gets worse: A friend of mine recently finished his masters and the dissertation topic he picked was quite new. As in, only 3 other teams (from 3 universities) have done research and publications on it. He told me that he literally didn't have much to cite, since all the papers referenced each other. So pretty much there are three teams who do work on a single topic and all their work is based on each other. On the upside, nobody from my friend's department had any idea on the topic, so they would be really unlikely to mark him down, if he said something wrong.

Our department has two "official" referencing formats - IEEE and Harvard. Generally, you can use whichever you want, unless it's explicitly mentioned that you have to use just one of them. Also, we don't really write as many essays and similar, so I'm sort of alright in that regard.

As a side note, if anyone is using BibTeX for their bibliographies, I found this websote [http://ottobib.com/] really useful as it generates the BibTeX info for you. It's super awesome.