Thanks, Chris! This is my thinking, also. Citation is not just about giving credit to avoid a charge of plagiarism. Citation is how we establish our scholarly credentials and communicate to our audience.
Audience is especially tricky for students, but many assume their audience is their professor (who knows everything! so why cite what is known to that reader?). So I also emphasize to students that part of the culture of citation is demonstrating that *you *know the literature. So you cite the critical works, even if they are well known to most of the readers or the work is well know. Although the Little Albert study probably appears in every intro psych text book and is a cultural meme of sorts, students indicate their scholarship by citing the report of this work (and, interestingly, some textbook authors reveal themselves as having relied on a secondary source when they misspell Rosalie's name 😱). The audience might well know where this appeared and doesn't necessarily need the citation, but including it signals that the writer has accessed the primary literature and read it. Similarly, accuracy of citations reflects on the care and scholarship of the author. These are subtle cues for expertise, but I think it would be helpful to make students aware of this side of authorship. Helps defuse the sense that citation practices are arbitrary hoops created for students to make them crazy. Best, Claudia _____________________________________________ Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D. Director Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment BLDG 53 Suite 201 University of West Florida Pensacola, FL 32514 Phone: (850) 857-6355 (direct) or 473-7435 (CUTLA) csta...@uwf.edu CUTLA Web Site: http://uwf.edu/offices/cutla/ <http://uwf.edu/cutla/> On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 10:42 AM, Christopher Green <chri...@yorku.ca> wrote: > > Many good points, Dap! You even have these kinds of differences among > different subfields of psychology, not just different nationalities. For > instance, every historian of psychology knows that William James was highly > active in the spiritualist movement from the 1880s until his death, but > many non-historian psychologists don't know it. So, I would be unlikely to > cite this fact if I were writing for a history of psychology journal. I > might do so, however, if I were writing for a generalist journal or an > experimental journal. The issue isn't so much how I came to know it as it > is whether my readers are likely to be aware of it as part of their general > knowledge. > > Best, > Chris > ----- > Christopher D. Green > Department of Psychology > York University > Toronto, ON M6C 1G4 > Canada > > chri...@yorku.ca > > --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=51311 or send a blank email to leave-51311-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
