From a Grecian mistake to retracted papers right through to levelling the playing field for all researchers – paying attention to how you reference is so important says Dr Andrew Porter…
From a Grecian mistake to retracted papers right through to levelling the playing field for all researchers – paying attention to how you reference is so important says Dr Andrew Porter…
I once ran into a spot of bother with referencing.
This interesting piece reflects upon the responsibilities of researchers when it comes to referencing. The inclusion and citing of earlier work is not a mechanical process that is simply a matter of ticking the box of formatting requirements and listing important sources of ideas. Researchers have a key role in judiciously selecting and correctly citing important earlier work. For instance, researchers should be careful not to cite work that has been retracted, work that is a product of paper mills or work that has appeared in a questionable publication.
I had a feeling this might not be quite right, but I was a bit too embarrassed to check because I assumed I was supposed to know how this worked already.
What I didn’t know until much later was that “Ibid” is just Latin shorthand for “in the same source” and it’s used to save space in footnotes when you’re quoting multiple times from the same manuscript.
This all came back to me recently when I was thinking about how researchers learn to reference while preparing tutorials for first year PhD students. Like so many things in research, what seems obvious once you know it can be completely incomprehensible until someone lets you in on the secret.
A surprisingly large number of papers continue to be cited after they have been retracted.
