Coaching researchers: How to cite a reference in an original article: Despite what you think, it might not be so obvious

08 October 2013

Most novice researchers make mistakes when citing a reference, and often times those mistakes go unnoticed for years, if caught at all.

Always cite the primary reference. In other words, if you are citing a paper because it mentions something that was as result of yet another paper, you are doing the wrong thing. Papers should be cited by something they have done. For example, a result they had, a methodology they used, or an opinion regarding their results stated in the Discussion section.
Read the article you are citing in full text. Do not cite an article merely because you read its abstract. Worse yet, do not cite an article because other articles have also cited it.
Unless an article is a landmark study in the topic you are discussing, do not describe it in isolation. In other words, cite article in perspective of other similar articles might have done. For example, instead of saying that Smith et al. have had such and such methods reaching such and such results, aggregate all articles talking about a certain topic and describe that topic as a whole in light of clusters of articles agreeing or disagreeing with a certain position.
In an ideal scenario, keep your references organized so that you know exactly which sections of a given article support whatever you might have used it for. For example, if you cite Smith at al. because that article reports a mortality rate of 2%, then your reference manager software should store the reference to Smith at al. along with the paragraphs in that paper where the 2% mortality rate are stated. Although this might sound like an overkill, this is a new trend and already present in reference management software such as JabRef combined with the reports package.

by Ricardo Pietrobon

About Me

My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.