Citation is an essential skill for all graduate students. In addition to protection yourself and your work from plagiarism, ensuring appropriate acknowledgement and providing necessarily context for your work, healthy citation practice also trains you in the art of contributing to the library and information science fields.
How? Simple! The information professions are supported by a number of active scholarly and professional communities, many of which publish journals and convene early (or more frequently!) at conferences. Journal articles and conference proceedings are authored by people from all corners of the information professions, from the academic librarians that you might expect to author papers to the school librarians whom you might not. You might well have a publication or conference presentation in your future.
Learning to cite accurately, becoming familiar with the technologies that can help you and familiarizing yourself with other citation support resources will not only help you advance your career and contribute to your field; these skills will also help you support your patrons. Citation is an essential skill underlying the research ethics and media literacy that information professionals are called upon to support.
To support you in developing good citation practice, I recorded the introductory video linked below. I also encourage you to spend some time with the following resources:
- Boston University School of Public Health’s When to Cite website
- Purdue University Online Writing Lab (“OWL”)
- A guide to selecting citation management software (which is a lifesaver)
- The slides used in the recorded module below (downloads as a .ppt file)