if you write something, cite something

 

If You Write Something, Cite Something

 

“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

― William Shakespeare

 

If you write it, cite it.

 

If there is one thing that differentiates academic writing from other forms of writing (besides a general and unfortunate impenetrability…), it is the requirement to cite sources. In short, if you say something and it is not your original thought, then you need to cite it. If it is your original thought, but someone else thought of it first, you still need to cite it. Not citing something someone else did is a form of plagiarism, namely the theft of an idea (which is, in part, why a literature review is so important). To be ethical and have integrity, you must cite sources.

Citing is also supporting evidence for your research and, when done well, clearly offsets what are your original thoughts. Unfortunately, the art of citing seems to be falling to the wayside in “peer-reviewed” literature. Peer-review has never been a guarantee of quality, and that is especially true today. Regardless, readers and reviewers trust that you have done your homework and are competent in your review of the literature and the resulting citations.

A poor job of citing previous literature reflects poorly on the research you did do. If you are sloppy with the details of citing, are you also sloppy with the details of your work? A good job citing previous literature builds your credibility for the paper you’ve written as well as for your reputation and future work.

Another reason to cite is to document and justify where your little tidbit of information came from. This allows a reader to access and read that citation to know more.

Citations can also be used as a CYA (Cover Your Ass). In other words, you site a source with the tidbit of info thus saving you from further research to verify the information. However, be careful here. You should always strive to cite reliable sources. And even reliable sources can be incorrect. If something is “general knowledge,” then I will generally stop at one citable source. If something is not general knowledge but I know it to be true, then I will generally stop at one citable source. If something is something I’m not sure of, I will find two to three sources to cite. By finding multiple sources, I can corroborate that the piece of information I am citing is probably correct.

Several folks list a number of “rules” for citing (for example, Penders 2018).

general knowledge

Many sources say that you do not have to cite general knowledge. My advice is to also cite “general knowledge,” because what is considered general varies from reader to reader, reviewer to reviewer, and people judging your work.

the pecking order

There is a pecking order for citing: (1) peer-reviewed literature, (2) gray literature, (3) press articles, (4) personal communications, and (5) random crap from the interwebs.

Peer-reviewed literature is clearly at the top. However, not all peer-reviewed literature is the same. In fact, there is so much crap being published these days that you really need to be careful on what you cite from peer-reviewed literature. Within peer-reviewed literature, credible sources, perhaps from recognized and respected experts or from recognized and respected journals, are at the tippytop of the heap.

After peer-reviewed literature, there’s “gray literature:” reports and whatnot that are generally not peer-reviewed. Many governmental reports, for example, or reports from research institutes are in the gray literature. Some of these reports undergo something of a peer review, but generally not at the academic level with anonymous reviewers (although these days, many of these gray reports are of higher quality than many “peer-reviewed” academic articles). For example, I used to work for the Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas at Austin. The Bureau’s formal reports underwent internal peer review. The U.S. Geological Survey runs its reports through a formidable internal peer review that sometimes includes external reviewers. Other gray literature may be proceedings papers that may or may not undergo a serious peer review. Consultant reports are also gray and generally considered to be lower in rank than governmental reports.

Next up are newspaper or magazine articles. The hard sciences generally consider these hearsay; that is, wholly unreliable (and, depending on your view of “fake news,” possibly inaccurate!). However, these articles are often useful for academic endeavors in history and policy and, yes, even science. For example, a spring a graduate student and I studied didn’t have real-time monitoring of flows until the 2000s, but the spring first went dry sometime in the 1960s. I was able to use newspaper reports to identify exactly when the springs went dry, one of which included photographic evidence of the dry spring. Is that hearsay?

Next up are personal communications. This is basically the academic version of “Bob told me so.” These citations are literally hearsay but (generally) from topical experts. Early in my academic career in the 1990s, you could willy-nilly throw in a personal communication with little trouble. These days, journals want to see that you (1) have communication in writing and (2) have permission from Bob that you can cite him. Ethics also plays a role—did the personal communicator know that their communication would show up in your report or paper? Are they in agreement with your quote or summary of what you said? It’s best to get written approval (an email is fine) from that person for the citation. When citing such communications, it’s important to note the person’s position (employee of the Internal Revenue Service, landowner of the spring, my friend Bob).

At or near the bottom is random stuff from the Internet. This includes blog posts, web pages, press articles from fringe publishers, and, yes, Wikipedia. This is not to say you can’t cite this stuff, but if you do, you need to be careful. And because these items are often ephemeral (or can change), you need to note when you downloaded it and, ideally, save it to a PDF for later referral or to produce it on request.

I really like Wikipedia. I make a monthly donation to them and volunteer as an editor (I mostly contribute on entries concerning the early Modernist architect, R.M. Schindler). I also use Wikipedia in my research, namely, to get a quick topical introduction and/or a lead on some citations as a starting point for deeper research. Some entries are excellent, and some are total crap. I’ve never cited Wikipedia in my academic text (Wikipedia 2025)[1].

I was in a review meeting with a few academics of a working academic’s research for a local community. One of the academics asked the working academic where a certain plot came from. The working academic hemmed and hawed before finally admitting “Wikipedia.” The reviewing academic looked at the plot on Wikipedia, followed the citation, and discovered that the poster had incorrectly manipulated the plot. Buyer beware.

Be careful about blogs as well. This pains me as a blogger since I micro-publish science to engage with the public on my work. But, again, buyer beware. That’s not to say you can’t cite blog posts. For example, if your research was inspired by an observation made in a blog post, give the author credit and cite it! Just verify whatever you cite.

Finally, be careful with using AI to find references. I’ve dabbled with using AI to assist me in my research and have been horrified at the results. AI is so eager to be helpful that it will create false facts and citations for references and books that don’t exist (although the authors may). It will also correctly present a fact but the citation it provides is not supportive of the fact. I read somewhere that the quality of the response improves if you politely ask your favorite AI not to lie, but that doesn’t work in my experience. At this point (2025), AI is an overzealous undergraduate assistant that writes well but has no clue what’s it’s doing. Perhaps that will change in the future.

the ideal

The ideal (the expectation!) is that you strive to cite peer-reviewed articles and/or original sources. If there are none, then choose something from the gray literature. If there’s nothing there, then something from the news. And if nothing there, then a personal communication. And then the interwebs.

Given the sorry state of peer-review these days, I recommend reading and citing at least three independent sources for a piece of information that you do not personally know is true or not (or seek your own peer review of an expert). One thing I’m seeing from my students is that they provide one citation for a fact, but I know that the fact is, in fact, incorrect. Multiple independent sources provide stronger support for a fact that you don’t know is true or not. 

The ideal also holds that you cite primary materials over derivatives. This is like ye olde rumor game where someone says something to someone and then, as what was said moves from person to person, what was said gets corrupted. Now you can lose a lifetime chasing down every little fact (and it’s depressing when you realize how wrong so much stuff is…), but if it’s easy to go primary, for Zeus’s sake, go primary!

For example, if you need to refer to a rule from an administrative body, instead of citing someone who refers to the rule, go get the damn rule and cite it yourself. This is going straight to the horse’s mouth. And it’s easy.

I write a monthly column where I summarize recent academic papers on water in Texas. One came across my desktop that dealt with a topic I am a recognized expert on. My academic ego instantly kicked in resulting in a search of the paper for my surname. Nothing. “Hmmmm…” I hmmmed. I wasn’t expecting the book I wrote on the topic to have been cited (global coverage), but I was a bit surprised that my report from a few years earlier wasn’t cited since it dealt with the same topic.

I read on.

The authors included a horribly incorrect factoid in the background section with a citation. I looked at the citation. It was a press release put out by a non-governmental organization about my report! So the authors cited a non-affiliated press release about my research report rather than the research report itself. The press release even included a link to the full report.

That’s simply rude since we academics are judged by review committees and peers by our citation indices. Furthermore, that’s a quarter-assed job of citing (not to mention that the authors misquoted the press release). I speculated that perhaps I had inadvertently cut the corresponding author off on Interstate 37 (if I did this, I’m sorry!). Although this could easily be interpreted as passive-aggressive, it’s far more likely that it’s simply sloppy citing, especially given that the rest of the paper was similarly sloppily cited. In addition, the authors missed a critical reference (that’s not just my ego talking there…) concerning their research area, a reference that would have prevented a number of other fundamental errors in the paper.

self-citing

You also want to watch for blatant self-citing. Self-citing involves citing your own work. To a certain extent, it makes sense to cite your previous work, especially if you are on a research arc that builds on your previous work. However, if you can, cite someone else and leave the self-citations for when they are clearly needed.

Self-citing is something of a controversial topic in academic circles. Standards are still being debated and considered. Regardless, there are some crazy examples out there such as one paper with 103 citations with 86 including the lead author. Another example included 55 citations with 54 of them citing themselves.

A certain amount of self-citing may be required. For example, self-citing is needed to avoid self-plagarism (“Yes, Virginia, you can plagiarize yourself.”). Self-plagiarism is a far more serious affair than excessive self-citing. The median self-citation rate is 12.7 percent (Ioannidis and others 2019), and male academics cite themselves 56 percent more than female academics (King and others 2017). John Ioannidis, author of a recent paper on self-citation, believes that “when more than 25% of an author’s references are self-citations, their work should be examined to check for potential ethical misconduct“ (Marques 2019). The ethical misconduct here is attempting to manipulate citation indices or even citing your own work in a paper when it has nothing to do with the paper.

Be proud of your work (but don’t be too proud).  

location, location, location

Where you cite is also important. For example:

The sky is blue, and the sea is deep (Duh 2014, Obvious 2023).

By placing the two citations at the end, you are inferring that both Duh and Obvious concluded that the sky is blue and the sea is deep. If, however, Dr. Duh concluded that the sky is blue and Dr. Obvious concluded that the sea is deep, you need to place your citations this way:

The sky is blue (Duh 2014), and the sea is deep (Obvious 2023).

In other words, place your citation immediately after the thought or fact the citation relates to. Now let’s say Dr Duh concluded that the sky is blue and the sea is deep but Dr. Obvious only concluded the sea is deep, then the sentence should look like this:

The sky is blue (Duh 2014), and the sea is deep (Duh 2014, Obvious 2023).

It’s OK that Duh appears twice in the same sentence because this is the only way to correctly and accurately present the citations. Just as you don’t want to say something that someone else did, you also don’t want to give someone credit for something they didn’t do. That’s sloppy citing and is rude to your reader. You don’t want your reader cursing your name as they try to find “the sky is blue” in Obvious (2023).

read what you cite

When you cite something, you are also saying that you read something, so read it. This also protects you from other people’s poor citing. In other words, if you don’t read something you cite, you are trusting that they read the source. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. So be sure to read everything you cite. This doesn’t mean you have to read everything to the last gory detail. If you are citing something for background, you might be able to get by with only reading the abstract or executive summary (although some will scoff at this). However, if you want to cite the Climate Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report for the IPPC, you are facing a PDF file with 2,409 pages in it. Hell, the average Bible only has 1,200 pages in it!

If you are citing something long like the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report or a book, include a page number in the citation:

The sky is blue (Duh 2014 p 127), and the sea is deep (Obvious 2023).

Your reader seeking the same information will love you, and you’ve demonstrated that you (probably) read the dang page.

You should definitely read everything and anything directly related to your research question. Not doing so risks fatal errors in your research and the subsequent professional embarrassment.

Sometimes you have to cite something that you can’t physically (or digitally) put your eyes on. This generally occurs with the gray literature but can also happen with obscure journals. If this happens, you can cite the citer who cited the citation:

The sky is blue (Duh 2014 as cited by Obvious 2023), and the sea is deep (Obvious 2023).

You should strive to avoid this, but sometimes it’s simply unavoidable.

get yer fresh citations here!

One of my colleagues is pursuing a Ph.D. Her advisor told her “Do not cite anything older than five years.” When I asked one of my Ph.D. students what he thought about this, he said that many professors give this guidance to their students.

Huh?

In my mind, you cite what you need to cite. However, writing this section has forced me to reflect on this.

Broadly, there are two (maybe three) categories of citations in a paper: (1) background cites, (2) research cites, and (3) discussion cites. For background citations, I concede that you should, indeed, cite more recent papers. For example, you may cite a review paper as background for your topic. If you have a choice of citing a paper from 2025 versus a paper from 2005, you need to cite the 2025 paper. If the 2005 paper includes elements not included in the 2025 paper, then cite both. Another example might be that you want to say:

The carbon dioxide levels have been been warming since the Industrial Age.

You could cite the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report published in 1990 and defend the statement; however, why would you not cite the most recent report published in 2023 that includes all the latest and greatest data and analysis? A review of comments on citing more recent material reveals that reviewers (and readers) will be suspicious of a paper that omits the latest work. It suggests that you are not aware of that work, which looks sloppy and can affect the perception of the rest of your work.

 For research citations, I think you cite what you need to cite, but, again, you should cite the more recent relevant work as well to demonstrate that you are aware of the full brunt of the literature on the topic. Ditto for discussion citations. 

hide the cite

 Unless you have a good reason, hide the cite. Place the citation inside parentheses unless you have a good reason not to. Hiding your citations improves readability; after all, they are (generally) there to provide support for what you are saying. For example:

The IPCC (2022) stated that temperatures are rising and that these rising temperatures will likely increase drought and extreme flood events.

Readability is improved by moving the direct (in-the-flow-of-the-text) citation to an indirect citation:

Rising temperatures will likely increase drought and extreme flood events (IPCC 2022).

 This is particularly important when using multiple references to support your statements:

Rising temperatures will likely increase drought and extreme flood events (USEPA 2017, Getting and Hawt 2019, IPCC 2022).

There are fewer words “in the flow,” which is always a good thing, and a direct tackling of what you really want to say.

There are, of course, times where you will need to use direct citations, such as when comparing and contrasting things. For example:

Hokey-Pokey (1932) said to put your right foot in and shake it all about; however, Kantdanz (1974) said to put your left foot in and shake it up and down.

  Use your best judgement (but prefer indirect over direct).

cite seeing

In the end, do not treat citing as an irritant or unimportant—it’s a critical part of your research. And take note about your interactions with citations in other people’s paper in the research you do. What works well? What irritates you? Learn from these experiences and make your own work more stellar.

references

Ioannidis, J.P.A., Baas, J., Klavans, R., and Boyack, K.W., 2019, A standardized citation metrics author database annotated for scientific field: PLoS Biology 17(8): e3000384. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000384

King, M.M., Bergstrom, C.T., Correll, S.J., Jacquet, J., and West, J.D., 2017, Men Set Their Own Cites High—Gender and self-citation across fields and over time: Socius, 3(1-22), https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023117738903.

Marques, F., 2019, The shadow of self-promotion—Database identifies 250 highly productive researchers suspected of excessive self-citation and cross-citation: pesquisa fapesp, issue 285, https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/the-shadow-of-self-promotion/

Penders, B., 2018, Ten simple rules for responsible referencing: PLoS Comput Biol. 2018 Apr; 14(4): e1006036, doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006036

Wikipedia, 2025, Reliability of Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia, accessed on February 2, 2025.

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[1] Well, shit (although this is not technically a technical report!).