Introduction

The purpose of this article is to provide information and inspiration for students, professors, researchers and others authors who need to write citations in their academic documents. The aim is to discuss the reasons for using citations and provide examples of how citations may be written. The article also contains a discussion about how others may use your citations as data for further analysis.

Four reasons for using citations in your academic document

The reasons for using citations (not ranked):

• The first reason why you need to cite your sources is that by citing your sources, you provide the reader with information that allows the reader to see and understand where your research stands in relation to previous research within the field.
• The second reason is to show the reader that you have scholarly knowledge about the academic field in question, and, in turn, that you are a worthy member of this field.
• The third reason is to build and support your arguments and to strengthen your analysis of the results that you put forward from your own investigation.
• The fourth reason is to avoid plagiarism. You do not want to publish a text where you put forward ideas, arguments or results that the reader might think are yours when they in fact belong to another author. Plagiarism is avoided when you cite your sources.

Examples of how you may cite your sources

In general, you use citations most often in the first part of your document, i.e. the introduction, and in the parts where you present your results and your analysis. In general, both experienced (senior) authors and beginner (junior) authors tend to use more citations in the introduction and in the results and analysis parts in academic documents, e.g. essays and articles. (There are no such citations in this article, but that is of course because it is not an academic document. If you write an academic document, e.g. an essay, you must provide these types of citations, for the aforementioned reasons.)

You should write your citations in the tradition and style within your academic discipline because authors from different academic disciplines tend to use citations in different ways. For example, the number of citations used may vary according to the discipline, i.e. citations are used more frequently in articles in some academic disciplines. In the humanities and the social sciences, for example, authors use citations more frequently compared to authors within the natural sciences and the engineering sciences. Further, the way that citations are used might also vary between disciplines.

For example, authors within the humanities and the social sciences integrate citations from various sources to a greater extent compared to authors from other disciplines such as physics or chemistry. In other words, they utilize different types of citations within the same article, with the aim to bring forward a set of different perspectives and arguments.

How others may use your citations as data for further analysis

The way you cite your sources can be studied by others. In other words, the citations in your academic document, together with information about how other authors within the same field write their citations, may be used as indicators for bibliometric analysis. Thus, large numbers of academic documents may be scanned and their citations indexed and used as data for a meta-study of the research that is reported in these documents, e.g. scientific articles. Bibliometric analysis is quantitative, given that it builds on numerical data about citations. At the same time, bibliometric analysis is qualitative, given that it also contributes to the wider interpretation of relationships between authors, institutions, and academic disciplines.

The way you use in-text citations, for example, can be used in bibliometrics research to analyze how you support your arguments. The use of citations within a discipline can also be studied to investigate what types of sources that are used, i.e. when authors support their arguments, and how they may have changed over time. Using citation data, researchers are thus able to map out and analyze the evolution of the research within a specific field. Citation behaviour among junior (beginner) and senior (experienced) academics within the same field may also be analyzed, to see if there are any differences. Do junior academics write articles that are different from those that more senior academics write, in terms of the types of sources they cite and the way they use these citations to build and support their arguments?

Ending remark

With the rhetorical question at the end of the previous paragraph, I end this article. I hope it has inspired you to not only write citations, but also contemplate and reflect on the way you use your citations. As you know, actions sometimes speak louder than words, and, as a consequence, the way you cite is perhaps as important as whom you cite.