The instructor leads a short discussion on the necessity of collecting publication information for citations.
Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to:
- List publication information commonly included in citations.
- Explain some purposes of citations.
Relevant Threshold Concepts
- Scholarship as conversation.
Suggestions for Use
- This activity should be helpful in classes where students will be creating citations for sources used in assignments.
- By understanding the basic purposes of citation and commonly included publication information, students may be better able to learn discipline-specific citation styles later.
- Consider using this activity before Activities 8B and 8C.
Pre-Class Preparation
- Review In-Class Procedure below.
- Read How to Cite Sources, Chapter 8 of Choosing & Using Sources.
- Prepare for leading the discussion, using your own remarks or the Possible Script below, if it seems helpful.
- Download and/or print In-Class Procedure and Possible Script so you can take them with you to class.
In-Class Procedure
- Project the list of publication information that is in the Possible Script, even if you aren’t using the rest of the script. Encourage students to take notes.
- Discuss basic publication information with students, using the Possible Script or your own remarks and giving examples.
Possible Script:
As students, you are both creators and users of knowledge. Through your academic work, you will enter into ongoing scholarly conversations, learning from others and contributing new knowledge. You will often use the ideas and works of others to strengthen an argument, create multimedia projects, and in a variety of other ways build on what other creators have developed before you. [Have any of you already used the work of others in your projects? What was your assignment? What did you use?]
It’s vital that your work is your own and that you use the work of others in ethical and honest ways, always giving credit where credit is due by clearly citing the creator and source.
Depending on the kind of scholarship you do, you will eventually need to use a specific citation style to credit the sources you use. [Have any of you ever had to cite sources in a particular style? Which style or for which course?]
While the exact formatting of citations styles varies, there are common pieces of publication information included in most citations. So, we will focus on those in some upcoming activities. [Can anyone already think of some pieces of information that are probably in all citations, regardless of style?)
Commonly cited publication information includes:
- Author or creator name/s.
- Publication date.
- Title of the object (article, video, etc.).
- Title of the publication (book, journal, newspaper, etc.).
- Page number range, if applicable.
- Publisher name (publishing house, website, etc.).
- Web address (URL), if applicable.
Not all of those pieces of information are available for each source. For instance, if you read a book in print, you obviously will not need to include a URL for it in the citation.
In some activities you’ll do in upcoming classes, you will ignore citation styles and build basic citations based on the available publication information such as the list that’s projected here.
The basic purposes of citation include giving proper credit to the source and providing publication information that helps other scholars locate the sources you use. Your work building basic citations is a big step in that direction, even though you won’t be using a particular citation style at that point. You’ll learn and use actual styles after that.
Relevant Choosing & Using Sources Chapters:
Chapter 8, How to Cite Sources.
