7. Appreciate how challenging it is to use and cite sources

Welcome to Part 7 and thanks for being here! 

Students find it challenging to incorporate sources into their writing and cite those sources, and we'll explore two problems in particular: 

Problem 1. Students are often just going through the motions of incorporating outside sources into their writing. 

When expert scholars write about a topic, it's usually a topic they're already familiar with, and they may even be familiar with many of the sources they're citing and how they want to leverage those sources to make certain points. Furthermore, they're usually writing with a clear objective in mind. For example, they may be reporting on specific research they conducted, or developing a persuasive argument – so, they're motivated to incorporate outside sources in a way that's thoughtful and strategic.

In contrast, when students research and write about topics, often the topic is completely new to them, as are the sources they're using. On top of those challenges, we're asking students to write about their topic in a scholarly fashion and incorporate and cite outside sources. That's a lot to manage! 

Plus, students may not find this work particularly motivating if they don't see themselves engaging in scholarly writing after they graduate. So it's not too surprising they go through the motions of incorporating and citing sources – but without much effort or skill. For example, they often employ patchwriting or extensive blockquotes. 

How is Cline Library's Research and Instruction Services (RIS) team addressing this problem? 

Lesson 7 of the Information Literacy Basics tutorial (https://ac.nau.edu/lms-apps/self-enroll/447456) is all about using and citing information sources. Part of this lesson explains how, when, and why authors incorporate outside sources by using direct quotations, summarizing, paraphrasing, and/or referring. 

For example, take a look at this excerpt from the tutorial that explains to students when and how they'd incorporate direct quotations into their writing.

Of course, just having students read about different techniques for incorporating sources is not enough. Students need to see more examples and get more practice, and that's where you come in!

How can YOU help address this problem? 

Consider devoting class time examining how scholars incorporate outside sources into their writing, using examples relevant to your course's content. Explicitly discuss why an author would choose to directly quote, summarize, paraphrase, or refer. That way students will get a better feel for how outside sources are used in the writing process and why. Tie this into a discussion about how citing outside sources presents necessary background information, context, or evidence for the reader – as well as enhancing the author's credibility. 

You might also want to show students how to track down and examine a cited source to see whether it's credible and whether the source legitimately bolsters the writer's claims. Show examples of effective and appropriate use of sources as well as examples where the author's use of a source is inappropriate or flimsy. Most importantly, show students examples of writing that makes strong claims about something, but fails to offer cited sources to back up the claim. That way students will more fully appreciate the utility and importance of citing. Sometimes you need to show the absence of something to appreciate why it's so important! 

Regarding these assignment ideas:

Problem 2: Students struggle to properly cite sources and there are lots of legitimate reasons why.

Many students enter college knowing very little about why to cite or how to cite – or even what citations are. But those are not their only challenges; consider the following:

1. To cite properly requires the ability to identify source types. 

As you learned in Part 2 of this guide, many students don't have enough experience with sources to tell them apart from each other, especially when they encounter them online. This means they'll struggle to cite sources.

2. Students can't find the appropriate elements needed to create a citation. 

Journal articles can be particularly challenging to cite because students usually view them as PDFs and are unaware that the article is part of a larger publication called a journal. Plus, the name of the journal is not always obvious on the PDF; often the journal's name is in tiny font in the header or footer, and sometimes it's abbreviated. The volume and issue numbers associated with a journal article PDF are often in the same spot as the journal's name, and in similarly tiny font, but those numbers mean nothing to students. Most students have never had to locate a journal article by finding the journal's appropriate print volume on the shelf, then locating the correct issue within that volume, and then thumbing to the correct page numbers within that issue. So, it's no wonder students struggle to understand what those numbers signify and where to find them to create a proper citation! 

Websites are also challenging to site since the way you construct them depends on what citation elements you can find, and there's no consistency from one website to another. While some websites have obvious titles, authors, and dates of publication, for others you can only find two out of three of those elements, or just one out of three. 

3. Citation style guides are difficult to use and sometimes they're incomplete and/or badly written. 

As content has moved online, citation style guides have not kept up particularly well. For example, some style guides require slightly different elements in an article citation depending on how it was found, such as in print, online from the publisher, online from a database, etc. Students don't know when they are viewing a source on a publishers' website or from within a database. Furthermore, if you've printed out an article PDF, is it a print source or an online source?

The most incomplete, outdated, and confusing style guides tend to be those that come from specific publishers such as IEEE or Geological Society of America. But even mainstream style guides like MLA and APA have omissions or are difficult to follow when the source you're citing is unusual in some way.

For example, look at the Geological Society of America guidelines for citing websites, shown to the right. First notice there are no explicit instructions for what to do if the author, date, or title are missing. But also look at that purple text in brackets. This text is extremely confusing for anyone to understand, plus it is incorrect insofar as anything appearing on the internet is considered to be published. Plus it refers to online articles and books as websites, which is also incorrect. In fact, this text offers an excellent example of the problem with conflating content on a website location with content coming from a website as a type of source. (See Part 2, Problem 3 for more details about this.)

4. It's often unclear whether to insert URLs or DOIs into a citation, which URL to use, or where to find the DOI. 

Some style guides dictate that URLs should be added to citations when available. But if the student found the source online through one of Cline Library's databases, they usually incorporate into their citation the URL they got from the database. Unfortunately, this is not a permanent URL so it may not lead back to the article, and even if it does, the link wouldn't work for anyone outside NAU's internet network. What they should be providing is the URL for where the source lives on the publisher's site, but there's no way students could possibly know that, nor would they know how to navigate to find it. As for DOIs, many students have no idea what they are, plus they appear in different locations depending on the article and students don't know how to find them, plus most older publications don't have a DOI. 

5. Most citation style guides fail to clearly address how to cite online-only journals or ahead-of-print publications. 

Some online-only journals and ahead-of-print online articles are not assigned volume and/or issue numbers and for most style guides, including common style guides like APA and MLA, it is very difficult to find instructions for how to create a citation in these situations. Most students wouldn't know when what words to use to search APA or MLA citation guides (like Purdue OWL) to find out how to cite these articles.

Furthermore, sometimes these types of articles have not been assigned page numbers – or, every article in the journal is numbered from page 1. For example, the online journal PLoS ONE numbers every article from page 1 and recommends that articles be cited using their unique number instead of a page number span. In the example citation below, the unique number is e0162266.

How is Cline Library's Research and Instruction Services (RIS) team addressing this problem? 

In Lesson 2 of the Information Literacy Basics tutorial (https://ac.nau.edu/lms-apps/self-enroll/447456) students learn about journal articles including strategies for finding the journal that the article was published in by looking in the header or footer of the article's PDF.  

Lesson 7 discusses citing in more detail, including where to find citation elements and what to do when you run into quirky problems such as a source with no volume numbers or page numbers. DOIs are also explained. But there are also things you can do to make citing easier for students!

How can YOU help address this problem? 

First, just appreciate how confusing citing is for students. Even librarians can't always find relevant guidelines for how to cite odd sources. 

Second, if you are not doing this already, consider asking students to use a standard style guide (like MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) that has lots of documentation available online. That way there's at least a better chance students will be able to find the documentation they need to put together a proper citation. So, if you don't have a compelling reason to ask undergraduates to use a more specialized style guide – such as a less-well documented society guide or a journal-specific style guide – then don't! You are just adding to their stress when you do! 

Comment on this content and/or collaborate with NAU librarians to find other solutions to these problems!

The content on this page is a work in progress and we'd love to improve it! Cline Library's Research and Instruction Services team is interested to hear any comments or suggestions you have on the content presented on this page, or your ideas for other solutions. Also, if you've already created assignments that address these issues, or you have ideas for assignments that would help address these issues, we'd love to hear from you. Contact us! 

Thank you for your time reading this guide to Information Literacy Assignment Design. If you want to peruse information literacy assignment ideas, then proceed to Part 8.