Shown above is an excerpt from a passage I contributed to the report of a research project. You may disagree with how I stack up references (I sometimes think of this as 'puking citations') but it is arguably an efficient way to show that I have 'done my job' in reviewing the lit without writing a lengthy narrative that has more information than most people care to read. I can write this way because I use one of two word processing programs (increasingly MS Word although I was long a fan of Mac's Pages program) and set my normal template up for minimal interference. On the other hand, lots of people are fans of the citation management programs. Shown above is this same passage re-visualized as it might be produced by one of those. So if you thought my first version was clunky or unclear - what about this? Presumably one has to go through the sentence, phrase by phrase, to match things up with the citations in order. When I encounter this type of writing - unfortunately in my view, that happens too frequently - I tend to look at the titles in the reference list to try to sort what's what and, in extreme cases, go as far as to retrieve the references - not necessarily because I'm interested in reading more but because I am trying to understand what the citing author is talking about. Bottom line - piling up the citations in a parenthetical phrase tends to offer the information in, I think, a far less helpful way. I would also offer that this follows the letter but not the spirit of the rules.
One selling point of these programs is that you can easily 'convert' from one 'style' to another - and I would argue if a writer is reformatting his or her article submission for a journal that uses an alternative style, he/she can damn well find the time to make some minimal edits to the sections that include references - which is often not most of the article unless it is solely a review of lit (and I have my own negative opinions about those for the most part anyway). For those writers in particular who use APA style - we have a range of ways to express, including: "Smith and Jones (2010)"; "According to Smith and Jones (2010)"; "Authors suggested X (Smith and Jones, 2010)" - and I think for both our sake and the readers' sake, we should take advantage of this variety just to try to make research articles - which may tend to be, to put it nicely, dry - more interesting reading. Even when using other styles, I have continued to insert citation references mid-sentence. I admit that I have not extensively used any of the software programs I am disparaging and it may be that what I tend to encounter is not so much use as misuse of them. When I began g-school, someone told me that I must get "Endnote" and that this person would never have made it through a dissertation without same. Well, I have not yet made it through the dissertation (still working on) but have written hundreds, if not thousands of pages of papers in g-school without use of a citation manager, either to manage citations or to write. And I continue to cringe when I encounter papers that have been 'engineered' through these programs. I use portable storage like old-fashioned file cabinets - folders for years, projects, classes, sub folders for projects or assignments inside those folders with one or two 'misc' folders here and there - and I write, I would have to say, pretty much manually, inserting the citation in the reference list (the other great 'time saver' the citation manager programs offer) as I cite them in text. The upside of this is that when it came time for my comprehensive exams, I did have a pretty fair memory of who wrote what - and I continue to add to it - because typing out my reference list by hand tends to help me remember it. I will confess to sometimes copy/pasting a reference from another paper - especially when writing something related (from the proposal of my dissertation to the document parts, for example) and, for me, that is enough of a time saver to be a boost now and then.
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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