I still don't understand citations.

[esmenet]

I probably shouldn't use this journaling platform as a place to ask ridiculously obvious questions that everybody else in the ENTIRE WORLD knows the answer to, but Google is no help and neither is my mom.

R-list, please tell me how citations actually work. I get the superscript-number-leading-to-footnote-with-source-info bit, but not what needs to be cited. I mean, if I'm talking about a specific event that I got out of a specific book, that needs one, but what about 'white usually symbolizes purity' or 'Krishna is blue'?

Comments

[azuire]

(It's k citations are annoying.) What format are you using? Word/HTML doc? What exactly do you need cited? Some things don't need it, e.g. "The Earth is round" or "the sky is blue" or "Friends is an awful TV show".

[chalcopyrite]

Mmm, citations. ♥

You're allowed to assume your readers have basic/common information -- basically, did it take special time and attention paid to this subject to find this? So, for instance, "The Earth is round" does not need to be footnoted; "The Earth has X particular curvature at this point" does.

[branchandroot]

It depends on your audience to an extent. I mean, if you write an article for the New York Times, you don't need to cite a statement like "gender roles were more restrictive in the past", but that may be the kind of thing a professor wants a citation for, in class--so that s/he knows and can see that you are going on more than hearsay and "well everyone knows" when you state that.

For "white usually symbolizes purity", well... if it's something like "in modern Western cultures, white generally symbolizes purity", it might be okay. But if you say "in Arthurian legend, white symbolizes purity" you need to back that up, not just with citations, but with actual evidence from the texts in question. And if you try to say that about a culture not part of your own lived experience, yeah you'd better have citations. It's all about why you need to point out the fact. Is it critical to your argument? That should probably have a citation or examples. How specific have you been about time and place, and it it a time and place you have the personal experience to assert this about?

If you say "Krishna is often depicted as blue" in an art history class, and you've just finished a set of slides showing just that, you don't need to cite it. But if you're doing a study of Hindu iconography and making some point about the respective colors people are painted with, then you should probably cite it because sure as the sun rises, if you don't, someone will point to a counter example from some time or context you didn't know or weren't focusing on.

Hope that helps bracket things a bit.

[aldanise]

{Preface: If this is horribly confusing, ignore it. I'm writing my senior thesis in Japanese history & literature, which means I'm thinking a lot about different cultures of citation.)

In addition to what branchandroot said, which is probably the most important thing to think about for citing, it also depends on the "culture" of the particular field that you're writing in, which might be part of what makes it confusing.

For example, citing in law review articles is usually mandatory if you're saying anything that you want people to believe, regardless of whether you feel you've demonstrated it with your own examples in the text. You also can (and frequently should) put tangential arguments down in the footnotes, so that people willing to take you on faith can keep reading, while others can dig into your research.

In my experience with literary analysis, on the other hand, scholars seem to want more of the argument in the essay, as it were, than down in the footnotes, though the footnotes can point you to other scholars with other arguments. Depending upon your audience (are you writing for an audience that prefers close-reading or critical theory?), it will be more or less important to cite other people's *ideas* versus using specific quotations from source texts in the essay and citing those.

So, to take "white symbolizes purity", in three* different contexts:
Law: White symbolizes purity (Footnote: As X, Y, Z have all argued in articles A, B, C. While G may disagree in article H, this is why X is actually correct.)
Close-reading: White symbolizes purity in these other parts of the text "quote" (footnote: where from) "quote" (footnote) "quote" (footnote), so it's doing the same thing here.
Critical Theory: As scholar X demonstrated when writing about Y, white symbolizes purity in this context. (footnote: scholar X, possibly with some elaboration on X's thought)
*Obviously, good lit scholars use both the close-reading and critical theory styles, but those are extreme examples to give some idea of the differences.

History seems to fall somewhere between law and close-reading lit, and according to my friends, the sciences have their own culture. So, very long-winded way of saying it depends heavily on your audience, and depending upon the field you're writing/reading in, the expectations may be different. I generally go with the rule of thumb that I should cite any argument (find someone else who has already made it) unless I'm prepared to spend substantial time (at least a paragraph for short essays) proving it and also cite any facts that are more obscure than "the earth is round", but this has definitely led to me getting papers back from lit professors going, "good citations, but possibly an excessive number of them."