Logan 5

Connor Logan
Jessica Zisa
Writing 2
21 March 2023

Using citations to study citations.

Let me share a story you know well. You are

writing a paper; you have spent the last 3 hours
working and you find the perfect quote to support
your argument. You have made it to the stage
when you get to spend 10 minutes going through
the website looking for a nonexistent publisher
that Easybib says you need. Citations are so
much more than this. In reality a citation is as
simple as a standardized way to reference the
work of others in your writing. The practice of
trying to make a standard way to list the work of
past authors is claimed
by the Chicago Press The Modern Language
to have first been done Association published the
by the Chicago press first MLA style sheet in 1951
in 1891. To the dismay
of highschoolers everywhere. The problem is that
the prosses of writing is very personal you
literally start with a blank page to fill with your
thoughts. But when this formal system collides
with the freedom and creativity of writing, an
interesting question arises. Does
the
background of the writer effect the
way that they use citations?

John Swales asked a similar question in 1986 when he published “Citation

Analysis and Discourse Analysis”. He noticed the lack of work on
the interaction between the writer’s background and their John Swales is a Professor
citations. In this article he broke citations into categories based Emeritus of Linguistics, and
on relevant traits, then quantified the different groups formed. the Co-Director of the
Swales found a lot of messy data with no clear common thread Michigan Corpus of
Academic Spoken English
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and concluded that there was not a correlation between the author and the citations
they use.
“Citation ultimately is a private process… the reason why an
author cites as he does must remain a matter for conjecture”
(Swales 54). Other studies would go on to disagree with his conclusion but still
referenced his work due to the method he pioneered.

The same year Swales published that article

Marianne Ferber would publish “Citations: Are They an
Objective Measure of Scholarly Merit?” Ferber
unintentionally entered this discourse by examining how the
gender of the author affects the papers they chose to cite.
Her study was simple, she sortied the papers into groups,
one with male authors and one with female authors then
tracking the gender of authors who cited these papers.
Ferber found that authors were more likely to cite the work of
authors with a similar gender.
“the results are consistent with the
hypothesis that researchers tend to cite a
larger proportion of authors of their own sex than they do of the
opposite sex”
(Ferber 388). Ferber showed that gender effects the way that citations are used in a
paper directly contradicting Swales and opening the door to more research on the topic.

Swales would continue his work on

citation analysis while finding similer results.
Citing one of his other works Amanda Swygart-
Hobaugh published “A Citation Analysis of the
Quantitative/Qualitative Methods Debate's
Reflection in Sociology Research: Implications
for Library Collection Development” in 2004.
Swygart-Hobaugh separated articles into
qualitative and quantitative articles. Unlike
Swales who looked at the scientific discipline of
the author she thought that chemists and
physicists would use similar practices so she lumped them all in one group. By looking
at the different statistics regarding the use of citations she determined that there were
stark differences between the citation practices of qualitative and quantitative articles .
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“Qualitative articles were comparably more likely to cite

monographs than journal articles, while quantitative articles were
more likely to cite journals then monographs”
(Swygart-Hobaugh 191). While Ferber had hinted at some differenced depending on the
gender of the author Swygart-Hobaugh showed that the academic background of the
writer dictated how they performed citations.
In 2016 Andreas Karatsolis published “Rhetorical
Patterns in Citations across Disciplines and Levels of Andreas is an Associate
Participation”. This paper looked at how citations were Director of Writing,
structured rather than their use. Karatsolis started out by Rhetoric, and
agreeing with Swales finding that “despite some Professional
disciplinary differences all participants used similar patterns Communication at MIT
of reference use” (Karatsolis 1). This is explained as most
likely due to the simple fact that citations are standardized in the scientific writing
community. But by splitting participants of the study into groups according to the amount
of experience they had in the community, showed that advisees were more likely to use
citations to prove a point where as advisors allowed their thinking to speak for itself.
“advisees had… more instances of reference, evaluation, and
elaboration than their advisors”
(Karatsolis 444).

In 2021 Saleh Arizavi and Yazdan published

“Citation Practices in Research Article Introductions:
The interplay between Disciplines and Research According to Academic
Methodologies”. They directly cited Swales and Marker “A Integral Citation
Swygart-Hobaugh in their literature review. While both is when you place the
papers are fundamental to their work, they only agree source authors name
with the findings of one study. They used Swales outside of the brackets”
(2013)
method of splitting citations up and quantifying them
based on categories. But to avoid the data noise that
led Swales to his conclusion they only delineated
between qualitative and quantitative studies like Non-Integral citations place
Swygart-Hobaugh. Saleh Arizavi and Choubsaz the citation elements within
Yazdan’s concluded that brackets (Academic Marker
2013)
“Using integral of non-integral citations
are strongly linked to the two variables of the study, where
qualitative articles rely on persona to add credibility and reliability
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to their standpoints more than authors using the other two research
methodologies”
(Arizavi, Yazdan 402). This conclusion continued to disagree with the findings of Swales
while adding the new idea that the way that citations are used is related to the author’s
academic background.

While this may seem like a long and convoluted

conversation between obscure scientific studies. By publishing a A Discourse Community has
paper with the wrong idea Swales introduced how to study this 3 factors: A common
topic and gave the rest of the authors idea to build on. Then Mechanism of communication,
Swygart-Hobaugh published her work using the same common a common goal, and a barrier
to entry to allow differentiation
mechanism of communication to directly disagree with Swales
between long time members
while adding a key piece of information. This conclusion would
and newer members.
not have been reached if the different parties had done this on
their own. This system works not because of authors status as
experts in the community or the barriers to entry that publishing provide, but the simple
citations that allow the good ideas form one party to propagate through the community
inspiring others. When author cites another article at the end of their papers they are
allowing other authors to build on their ideas and furthering the progress of science in
the 21st century.
By working together and using citations the scientific community manages to
become more than the sum of there parts. This would be impossible but for the ability to
track the flow of ideas in a common agreed upon form of communication like the one
provided by citations. While writing citations is a pain but the scientific system and high
school teachers looking for job security rely on your citations so pay attention and make
sure that you only put the name of the journal in italics not the article within the journal.

Citations:
Arizavi, Saleh, and Yazdan Choubsaz. “Citation Practices in Research Article
Introductions: The Interplay between Disciplines and Research Methodologies.”
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, vol. 31, no. 3, 2021, pp. 383–405.,
doi.org/10.1111/ijal.12337.
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Ferber, Marianne A. “Citations: Are They an Objective Measure of Scholarly Merit?”

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 11, no. 2, 1986, pp. 381–
389., https://doi.org/10.1086/494230.

Karatsolis, Andreas. “Rhetorical Patterns in Citations across Disciplines and Levels of

Participation.” Journal of Writing Research, vol. 7, no. 3, 2016, pp. 425–452.,
doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2016.07.03.06.

Manning , Daniel. “Should I Mix Integral and Non-Integral Citations?” Academic Marker,
Academic Marker, 12 July 2022, https://academicmarker.com/academic-
guidance/referencing/referencing-features/citation-types/should-i-mix-integral-and-
non-integral-citations/#:~:text=Used%20to%20change%20the%20focus,How
%20are%20reporting%20verbs%20helpful%3F.

SWALES, J. “Citation Analysis and Discourse Analysis.” Applied Linguistics, vol. 7, no.
1, 1986, pp. 39–56., https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/7.1.39.

Swygart-Hobaugh, Amanda J. “A Citation Analysis of the Quantitative/Qualitative

Methods Debate's Reflection in Sociology Research: Implications for Library
Collection Development.” Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical
Services, vol. 28, no. 2, 26 Dec. 2004, pp. 180–195.,
doi.org/10.1016/j.lcats.2004.02.003.

Stout, Roland P. “‘It's a Shame to Put Such Wonderful Thoughts in Such Poor
Language’. A Chemist's Perspective on Writing in the Disciplines.” Across the
Disciplines, vol. 8, no. 1, Feb. 2011, pp. 1–14., doi.org/10.37514/atd-
j.2011.8.1.03.