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How and Why to Cite

Why to cite

When writing an academic text, you need to clearly identify the documents you have used and drawn on in your work. This will enable the readers to trace back the literature you have consulted and thus enable them to verify your statements. You are also demonstrating your knowledge of the scholarly topic you are writing about. This referencing of sources is called citation. By citing correctly, you avoid the suspicion of plagiarism.


In addition, citation analysis is used to measure the outputs of research or the success rate of researchers and institutions. It helps to determine the relevance of a topic - simply put, the more authors cite a particular researcher, the more important that researcher is. Briefly about citation or bibliometrics. For more on measuring the quality and quantity in research and citation and publication analysis, see the section on Research Support.


The obligation to cite is stated in the Copyright Act as well as in the Dean's Provision no. 18/2015. The method of citation or citation style is recommended at the FSV according to the standard ČSN ISO 690. Information and documentation - Rules for bibliographic references and citations of information sources. However, this standard is only recommended and some institutes use other citation styles. If you are starting to write an academic text, it is advisable to check the current rules in force at your institute. If you are publishing in another institution or journal, it is likely that they will require citation according to a different citation style. Always ask what citation rules the institution follows.


General principles of citation


  • Cite the sources of all the data and ideas you have used in your paper.

  • Make sure that the information in the citations is clear, and follow the same rules for all citations in the list of references used, including consistent formatting (e.g. punctuation).

  • Give full details in the citation (less is not more in this case).

  • Always adopt the information in the citation from a specific document (i.e. with a book or another source of information in your hand), avoid so-called secondary citations (i.e. citations of original works cited in another work; it is better to look up the original work and cite it specifically).

  • As a rule, do not look for missing information, but omit it (e.g. ISBN, full author's first name, etc.). The exception is the date of publication, which is an important piece of information for the reader and can be traced or guessed.

  • If the date of publication is not given, but you have nevertheless traced it from another source or have estimated it, this date should be given in square brackets (e.g.: [ca. 1750], [198?]).

  • Unless absolutely necessary, do not abbreviate the words contained in the information about the publication cited.

  • Citing online sources follows almost the same rules as print sources, again it is important to be able to trace the source back.

  • If you are using one of the help tools to work with citations, always check the result.

  • Information is written in the language of the document (it is not translated). Exceptions are physical description data such as pagination and notes, additional information in round brackets, abbreviations and conjunctions.

  • Data on information sources that are not in Latin characters must always be transliterated (e.g. from Cyrillic characters) or transcribed (from Japanese characters).


When you do not need to quote


  • When writing from your own experience, your own perceptions, your own thoughts, etc., or when you describe the results of your own experiments or observations,

  • When using your own drawings, digital photographs, video, audio, etc.,

  • When referring to so-called common knowledge, e.g. folklore, myths, rumours and urban legends, historical events (not applicable to historical documents),

  • When using generally known knowledge, e.g. car emissions have a bad effect on the environment, or facts that are accepted as general within a particular field, e.g. Newton's laws of motion; BUT! If you want to state with how much percentage cars contribute to the production of carbon dioxide, you already have to state a citation.


Which elements to use when quoting

Paraphrasing

These are longer texts where you summarise or repeat in your own words the ideas of another author (or your own previously published). It is useful to point out to the reader in the text that the following ideas come from another source, or the following formulations can be used (for example ...as J. Procházka states, the research of J. Procházka shows.


It is not always necessary to give a page number for paraphrases, but it is appropriate. If a paraphrase has more than one sentence, it is possible to give a citation only for the first sentence if it is clear from the further text that it draws on a single source.


Example:

Sonia Livingstone (2007) points out how the family's shared use of home media is transformed into private consumption of individually owned media through price reduction and increasing portability.


Direct quotation


It is the exact wording of a part of another author's text, usually separated by quotation marks from the text of the work.


Example:

Inner speech is a paradoxical phenomenon. It is an experience that is central to many people’s everyday lives, and yet it presents considerable challenges to any effort to study it scientifically. Nevertheless, a wide range of methodologies and approaches have combined to shed light on the subjective experience of inner speech and its cognitive and neural underpinnings. (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough 2015, p. 957)


References in the text


They refer the reader to a list of references; the references may take different forms, determined by the citation style chosen. Most often they take the form of a superscript, a number in brackets or specific wording - e.g. (author, date).


Examples:

Sonia Livingstone (2007) points out how the family's shared use of home media is transformed into private consumption of individually owned media through price reduction and increasing portability.


Sonia Livingstone 1 points out how the family's shared use of home media is transformed into private consumption of individually owned media through price reduction and increasing portability.


Sonia Livingstone (1) points out how the family's shared use of home media is transformed into private consumption of individually owned media through price reduction and increasing portability.


List of references


It is a list of literature used in the text, sequenced according to the rules of the citation style.


The list must include all the works whose ideas you mention in the text and may not include works that are not mentioned in the text.


Example:


ARNETT, Jeffrey Jensen: Adolescents‘ Uses of Media for Self-Socialization. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 1995, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 519–533.


ARNETT, Jeffrey Jensen, LARSON, Reed and OFFER, Daniel: Beyond Effects: Adolescents as Active Media Users. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 1995, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 511–518.


BANDURA, Albert: Social learning and personality development. London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.


BAUER, Lukáš. ICT v každodenních praxích mladých Romů. Diploma thesis. Brno: Masaryk University in Brno, Faculty of Social Studies, 2013. [cit. 2014-10-01]. Available at: http://is.muni.cz/th/179224/fss_m_a2/DIPLOMOVA_PRACE_2013_bau-er_s_rozhovory.pdf


BOYD, Danah: Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics. Dissertation thesis. University of California-Berkeley: School of Information, 2008.


BOYD, Danah: Friendship. In ITO, Mizuko (ed.). Hanging out, Messing around and Geeking out. Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010, pp. 79–115. [cit. 2009-10-29]. Available at:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/hanging_out.pdf



Last change: November 14, 2021 15:23 
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