Citation

While their uses for upholding intellectual honesty and bolstering claims are typically foregrounded in teaching materials and style guides (e.g.,[2][3]), correct attribution of insights to previous sources is just one of these purposes.

[6] Conventions of citation (e.g., placement of dates within parentheses, superscripted endnotes vs. footnotes, colons or commas for page numbers, etc.)

A bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other published item.

[9] Citation content can vary depending on the type of source and may include: Along with information such as authors, date of publication, title and page numbers, citations may also include unique identifiers depending on the type of work being referred to.

The organizational logic of the bibliography is that sources are listed in their order of appearance in-text, rather than alphabetically by author last name.

Other styles include a list of the citations, with complete bibliographical references, in an end section, sorted alphabetically by author.

[18][19][20] The various guides thus specify order of appearance, for example, of publication date, title, and page numbers following the author name, in addition to conventions of punctuation, use of italics, emphasis, parenthesis, quotation marks, etc., particular to their style.

Individual publishers often have their own in-house variations as well, and some works are so long-established as to have their own citation methods too: Stephanus pagination for Plato; Bekker numbers for Aristotle; citing the Bible by book, chapter and verse; or Shakespeare notation by play.

In their research on footnotes in scholarly journals in the field of communication, Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova have found that citations to online sources have a rate of decay (as cited pages are taken down), which they call a "half-life", that renders footnotes in those journals less useful for scholarship over time.

[33] Another important issue is citation errors, which often occur due to carelessness on either the researcher or journal editor's part in the publication procedure.

[36] Another study noted that approximately 25% citations do not support the claims made, a finding that affects many disciplines, including history.

Baruch Lev and other advocates of accounting reform consider the number of times a patent is cited to be a significant metric of its quality, and thus of innovation.

[55] Two metascientists reported that in a growing scientific field, citations disproportionately cite already well-cited papers, possibly slowing and inhibiting canonical progress to some degree in some cases.

[62] Better availability of integrable open citation information could be useful in addressing the "overwhelming amount of scientific literature".

[63] Since 2015, the altmetrics platform Altmetric.com also shows citing English Wikipedia articles for a given study, later adding other language editions.

[68][69][circular reference] Research indicates a large share of academic citations on the platform are paywalled and hence inaccessible to many readers.

[72] The phrase is reflective of the policies of verifiability and no original research on Wikipedia and has become a general Internet meme.