Did you know that each one of the four citations in academic papers is usually wrong or misleading? Yes, that’s true. Many people make citation errors when using references in their research, and that causes confusion. That causes us difficulties as researchers, as it is difficult to follow who cited what and who did what later on.
That’s why it is important to properly reference your cited work in your academic paper writing. That is why in this article I wanted to talk about citations, especially how to avoid common citation mistakes in your research.
Some time ago I did talk about academic citations, but I focused on citation management systems. But I do want to talk about the 5 steps to properly reference your literature sources so that you don’t get others confused, and more importantly, so that you don’t get them angry.
I know you can relate to that because, you know it’s true that when you find a source that you really, really need and then you go to that original source and you realize that it’s wrong, the data is not there or the source doesn’t exist.
Annoying and very confusing. But such citation mistakes are really common!
I personally find it very irritating when people use the wrong references in their work. And this is something that peer reviewers won’t be able to pick up, that is unless they spend at least 3-5 hrs reading each paper – but who has this amount of time to check for common citation mistakes?
The ultimate way to reduce the citation mistakes in cited work is to educate and promote the right way of making citations. And that’s why I wanted to give you the 5 steps that I use to actually properly reference your sources so that you help others find the references that you actually used.
Step #1: Avoid common citation mistakes by defining your citation management strategy
Step number one to avoid common citation mistakes is to define your reference management strategy. I know the strategy is a fancy word that many people use, but it boils down to selection, whether you do your references manually or whether you use the software.
Managing your references manually has been there for ages. I used to do my references manually until my master’s thesis. Basically, when you do your references manually, it means that you have a document with your references and you keep track of what you cite and when you cite specific papers using your own manual management systems. It could be a piece of paper. It could be a document in Word. But the downside of managing your citations manually is that it tends to be quite time consuming. It may also be difficult to change the citation format.
Luckily, you can use software to automate this.
You can use Mendeley or Zotero or even EndNote to manage your references. Well, reference management software lets you create your own database of references and that database of references can be linked with any of your documents.
You can use the reference directly in MS Word or LaTeX and so on based on your database. And that database can be used later with any sort of documents that you use, you can copy-paste your text, and your references will be still active.
I need to make an important point here. You have to decide how you manage your references before you actually start writing. It’s easy to just jump into it, but it’s pretty important to understand what is involved. And then if you use software, remember it’s just software, so it can lead to citation mistakes.
Step #2: Avoid common citation mistakes by selecting the appropriate citation style for your document
Step number two, you do need to decide on your citation style. Note that in many cases of academic writing, the citation style is usually predefined. You need to check the specific guideline that you need to follow when writing your academic texts. If you are writing a thesis, your university might actually have a guideline and requirement to use a specific referencing style.
The same applies to academic journals. Please do check the guidelines for authors because they usually specify what sort of references they want. If the guideline doesn’t specify any specific citation style, please do check already published papers – you will be able to see what sort of citation style was used by other people who published in this specific journal.
In terms of the types of citation style, we usually distinguish two main types.
The author-date type (i.e. Harvard citation style) is a citation style where you use the author’s name and date when making the intext citations. The bibliography, or your reference list, follows a pretty standard format that is a list of authors, publication date, the title of the journal paper, and then you got the journal name with its characteristics, such as volume, issue, and page. Of course, different documents will be cited differently.
Please do refer to the Harvard citation style guidelines for details. Note that you may need to find a detailed guideline on each specific type of author-date citation style.
We do also have a numbered citation style, where you number references in chronological order as they appear in your text. It is sometimes referred to as an author-number citation style.
In this citation style, the first paper that you ever cite in your document would be number one. The next paper would be number two and so on. You can check the Vancouver citation style guidelines for details.