On Campus, the Debate Over iPods Continues

One of the most grating parts of dealing with all of the variant citation styles, for a librarian, is that none of them are particularly well designed. The point of a citation (aside from giving credit) is to provide information for another researcher to retrieve that same document, right? Well, who are the experts in document retrieval? Librarians! The citation style editors clearly aren’t consulting with librarians when they make their rules, and revisions, because they include useless information and leave out important information. No one actually uses the place of publication to find a book, but the ISBN would be really helpful. The ISSN is even more important for a journal because there are multiple journals with the same name (at least 5 serious serial publications in the world called “Education”). And searching by ISSN in library holdings systems, even Google, is the fastest way to get directly to that title. But NONE of the major styles require it – why?

APA took a big step forward with the DOI. But MLA and Chicago are still in the dark ages.

And don’t get me started about ASA (sociology), AMA (medicine), and the handful of other styles that certain profs require students to use but that are far less-developed in terms of official documentation about the hundreds of unusual situations (so many kinds of gray literature!) that students struggle with.  Anyone want to provide the canonical documentation for citing “another professor’s PowerPoint” in ASA? The handout that the professional workshop trainer passed out to the paid participants in AMA?  

If you’re going to “take off points” from students’ work, you must only require a system that has clear rules for every situation, or they will correctly perceive your grading system to be unfair. Saying that they can use citation software is a cop-out – you’re admitting that they have to invest learning-curve time to master another software system that has nothing to do with their studies, and even then such software gets some things wrong (article title case in APA, anyone? hardly an obscure situation) so the students can’t use the software to avoid learning the arcane rules for fear of losing points.

Thanks for the correction re:Chicago – I withdraw my “dark ages” comment about them. I don’t know who claims the right to define the “human readable” test. I guess you think a Social Security Number is not human readable either but many people seem able to use it. In the academic context, user has citation and wants document, user takes citation information to library search tools to find it (eg catalogue for books, maybe another search engine for journal articles/titles), if library does not own it, user takes citation to interlibrary loan staff. In all of these steps, having the unique identifying numbers will result in faster and easier success at the end goal. For the vast majority of existing article literature, which do NOT have DOIs, “article title plus journal title” will NOT “get you there” when “get you there” means the ILL staff getting a copy for you because it’s not available online. I’ve seen ILL staff waste a lot of their time and the patrons’ because of confusing same-name journal problems that providing the ISSN (an even shorter number than your Social Sec Num) would have resolved.

You know you lost the argument when you resort to students “stepping into the river of tradition” as if you aren’t side-stepping the entire point of this multi-article discussion, which is that there are pointless, time-wasting traditions that students rightfully resent and that are interfering with real learning taking place.

Place of publication can be important for citation of many works published before 1800: it may not help you find a copy in your local library but it will help you to identify the version of the work to which the citation refers. The ISBN standard was only developed and implemented around 1970, and so would not seem particularly useful in citations of works printed before that time.

DOI is a coded string (numbers, letters, punctuation marks) that uniquely identifies a single article using a central database like the one at crossref.org. JSTOR is a full text article database. JSTOR might be the holder of articles to which DOIs point. Or more specifically, if you have the DOI for an article, you hand it to crossref.org, which could then give you the URL to the actual article (which might be in JSTOR or some other site).
DOIs are problematic though, in that the crossref server will only tell you one official URL to get to that article, and often a library’s patrons will have full text access to that article in a different place, like in an “aggregate” database – the crossref/DOI system uses the publisher’s own web site copy as the official target.

gnex66, you are still seeing the world too strongly through an online perspective – I’m guessing that you may be in a STEM field and/or likely at an institution with a lot of Big Deal packages that give you access to most online journals.  There’s a reason that libraries still subscribe to hundreds of print journals, and haven’t thrown away the thousands of shelf-feet worth of the print journals they already have. There is a huge body of past literature, and still substantial one of current literature, that requires an old-fashion “look it up in the catalogue/place an ILL request” approach to read.  And there are hundreds of smaller institutions around the US that cannot afford the enormous costs of the Big Deal packages, and thus their patrons only have access to a tiny sliver of what is theoretically “on the Internet” (referable via DOI).  

I will agree that the ISSN would have been even more useful to include in citations over the last 40 years than today (what were APAs and MLAs excuses 20 years ago?), but it would still be relevant for many researchers today.  Since the DOI can actually be used to retrieve the ISSN itself, I would like to see APA at least modify its rule to require either the DOI or ISSN (if no DOI available and an ISSN is). While the rest of a complete citation is technically sufficient to indicate a particular article without the ISSN, even in the same-name situation, in practice it wastes a lot of time by patrons and library staff to look up holdings/place ILL requests, when that simple 8-digit number would have gotten right to the holdings very quickly. Aside from same-name problems, patrons run into all kinds of confusion with similar-name journals, confusing abbreviations of journal names, and just inability to type long confusing words correctly (watch a typical undergrad patron try to search for the Journal of Roentgenology or Archaeology or Orthopaedics – giving them 8 numbers to type would be a kindness!).

In theory, a DOI (or PMID as well for people in the medical fields) is so precise that if you include one, you shouldn’t have to include ANYTHING else because it uniquely specifies a particular article.  But aside from typos (like you said, one wrong character renders it useless), reference lists would lose their other reason for existing (giving credit to authors) if we didn’t include at least the author(s) name(s).

Professor Shick wrote:
“The intricacies and formalities of citation become useful to scholars only when they publish their work.”
 
Carol Saller responds:
“It is more important to teach students how to locate, read, and analyze sources than to cite them with every hair in place.”
 
 The “every hair in place” analogy is a valid one. Grooming is an editorial concern. However, IMO, both provocative essays miss the most important reason for recording a thorough identification of sources *at the moment each is used.* That is: our need to ensure that the body of knowledge we accumulate in the research process is—to every extent possible—factually accurate, correctly interpreted, and soundly reasoned.  Whether we publish or not, these factors affect the validity of our knowledge.
 
Surely, education is not an arbitrary choice between nitpicking citations and analytical thinking! The two are inseparable.  On both sides of the issue, proponents agree that learning is not just a matter of accumulating “facts.” The real issue is whether we can accurately interpret and analyze information in any source, at first contact, by applying our currently limited knowledge base. The more research we do, the more discrepancies emerge between the materials we have accumulated. Evaluation, then, requires us to understand the precise nature of each past source from which we took each “fact,” assertion, or opinion.  If, at each point of contact, we do not record all essential details about the source and the creator—including a textual analysis of the item as well as an appraisal of the content—then our conclusions, published or not, are likely to be shallow or flawed.
 
Each field has its particular needs and some are far more demanding than others. Here, I speak within the parameters of the field in which I have worked for four decades: history. (It might also be germane to note that, across that time, I have published in peer-reviewed journals in four academic fields, as well as with university presses, and necessarily applied all those different styles of grooming hair.)
 
As a historian, yes, I have to “locate, read, and analyze sources.” But that analysis is not something done just one source at a time, after which my judgment about that source and its content is frozen.  I must continually reevaluate past judgments, each time something new is found. How can I do that if I have not adequately identified past sources and recorded a descriptive analysis of each?
 
I need to know whether the source was an original document, a transcript, an abstract, or an extract of selected “facts” taken out of context. Or is it a monograph in which the author has synthesized material and subjectively argued a case? If I am working with original material, I need to record the identity of the creator and/or the informant so that I can evaluate whether those persons had firsthand knowledge, whether they were influenced by bias, or whether they reported the information after they had gone senile. I need to record, at the point of contact, a physical analysis of the document and/or the collection so that my future revaluations can realistically compare contradictory or incomplete sources and weigh the likely validity of one against the other.  If I am working with derivative materials, I need to know whether the item is a transcript in which errors are typically introduced, or a typescript done in later centuries by someone not conversant with old penmanship, or an abstract that—by definition—might omit details critical to my understanding of the information or the historical situation. &c &c &c!
 
In retrospect, a professional life  spent not just writing but also critiquing, fact-checking, and editing manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals and university presses has, frankly, left me amazed at the amount of factual error and evidentiary misunderstanding—not just confused attributions—made by scholars and students alike. Almost all cases have had the same root cause: an assumption that the purpose of source identification is “so others will know where we got our stuff,” rather than a personal need to correctly interpret our findings and exercise quality control.
 
Source citation should not be something we concern ourselves with only at publication. Its real place is at point-of-contact with each source.
 
Elizabeth Shown Mills