Academic Honesty Guide > Part II: Principles of Citation > Section 1: The Importance of Citation
A citation is both a signpost and an acknowledgment. As a signpost, it signals the location of your source. As an acknowledgment, it reveals your indebtedness to that source. In both these ways citations help you communicate with your reader. By using them, you tell the reader whose idea or words you are using in each sentence and in each paragraph.
A citation can appear in different formats: within the text (in-text citation), at the bottom of the page (footnotes), or at the end of the paper (endnotes). Different disciplines use different formats; thus, the mechanics of citing require attention to detail. For answers to specific questions on the mechanics of citation, please consult the sources that describe each type later in this section.
As both a principle and a practice, citation lies at the heart of academic life, which is committed to engaging, debating, and building upon the ideas of others. In particular, we would underscore three reasons why it is important to cite sources accurately and thoroughly.
First, citing sources is important because, if you use someone else’s idea or phrasing without giving credit, you violate that person’s ownership. To understand this violation, envision the following scenario: While you and your friend are discussing some ideas from class one day, you make what you consider to be a particularly insightful observation. During a later class discussion, your friend brings up your observation but neglects to point out that it is your idea, not theirs. The instructor beams and compliments your friend on their clear and insightful thinking. In this scenario, you likely feel that there’s something unfair about your friend’s implicit claim that your idea was their own. After all, you had been thinking about the idea and perhaps had devoted time to developing it, yet you are not getting credit for it. Worse, someone else is. That sense of violation, the sense something valuable has been stolen from you, suggests why failure to cite sources hurts another person.
Second, citing sources is important because academics value being able to trace how ideas develop. Consider the scientist who reads about an experiment in a publication and then decides to perform an experiment to extend the results of the earlier one. At the same time, other scientists plan experiments to test the findings, to contest or confirm the findings, and to relate the findings to their own research. All of these “second-generation” experiments owe their inspiration to the original idea. If another person reads one of the “second-generation” ideas, proper citation will allow that person to explore the original publication to trace how the idea has developed. In general, scholars must be able to trace how ideas develop in order to consider and test them accurately. So, giving credit to the original source of ideas allows academics to understand how ideas develop in academia, an understanding that helps them better approximate the truth.
Third, citing the sources of ideas or evidence is important because knowledge is the currency of academia. Academics want to accumulate that currency; they want to get credit for their contributions. In fact, many academic fields have created citation indexes or other elaborate systems that track and quantify the number of times scholarly publications are cited, which is often used to evaluate the impact particular scholars have made in their area of research. Citation analysis, in this form, can be used to determine grants, rank the prestige of journals, shape promotions and tenure of faculty, or even determine government funding levels for particular departments or programs. A writer who cites the ideas or research of others, therefore, offers substantial credit that recognizes the contributions of this prior work.
For these three reasons, it is important both to cite sources and to use them well. Neither is easy. Throughout your college career you will learn how to cite, when to cite, and why to cite. Your work in the First-Year Tutorial helps you begin to consider these important questions.
For more discussion on the ethical responsibilities of researchers in citing sources, sharing credit, and other matters, please consult the following works that are available digitally through our library catalog:
- On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research, Third Edition (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, 2009), pp. 29-38.
- Ken Hyland, “Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge,” Applied Linguistics, Volume 20, Issue 3, September 1999, pp. 341–367.
- David Henige, “Discouraging Verification: Citation Practices Across the Disciplines,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Volume 37, Issue 2, January 2006, pp. 99-118.
- Bjorn Hellqvist, “Referencing in the Humanities and its Implications for Citation Analysis,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Volume 61, Issue 2, February 2010, pp. 310-318.