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Cited by 3Library Science and Information LiteracyAcademic Writing and Publishingscientometrics and bibliometrics research

Giving Credit: How Well Do Librarians Cite and Quote Their Sources?

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Genzinger, Peter, Wills, Deborah·2017·Reference & User Services Quarterly
DOI 10.5860/rusq.57.1.6440
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Abstract

The practice of citing references is integral to scholarship. This paper focuses on three prominent journals for library science: College and Research Libraries, Library Resources and Technical Services, and Reference and User Services Quarterly. Errors in both citations and quotations were found in all three journals, although no statistically significant differences among journals were discovered. Citation errors of less than 10 percent were found for all three journals, while in total, 30.3 percent of quotations were judged to be questionable in some way. The paper includes recommendations for authors, editors and librarians. It also recommends further study of errors in quotations, which appear more troubling than those in citations.

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Genzinger, P., & Wills, D.
ORCID
Genzinger, Peter
Venue
Reference & User Services Quarterly
Publisher
American Library Association
Published
2017-10-09
Volume
57
Issue
1
Pages
30-41
ISSN
1094-9054 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.5860/rusq.57.1.6440
OpenAlex
W2761552904
Cited by
3
References
23
Citations by year
2025: 2 · 2023: 1
FWCI
0.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
other-oa
Locations
  • Reference & User Services Quarterly (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • Scholars Commons (Wilfrid Laurier University) (submittedVersion)
Funders
University of Waterloo
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Library Science and Information Literacy
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
Keywords
citation errors, quotation errors, source attribution, academic integrity, library science journals, scholarly publishing

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

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