Citation SituationBishop & McDevittPaLA Annual Conference 2016
Who Responded to the Survey?
Of 137 total completed surveys, over half of the responses came from Humanities and Social Sciences (37%) andHealth and Human Services (21%). The Colleges of Education and Educational Technology (18%) and Natural Sciences and Mathematics (14%) also responded well to the survey.
The responses werespread evenly between instructors (18%), assistant professors (30%), associate professors (26%), and full professors (26%). Most respondents are teaching lower and/or upper-level undergraduate classes.
The majority of respondents(89%)indicate that they ask students to complete assignments that require the use of information sources. Of that group, most (68%) require the use of information sources in all of their classes, while others (21%) require information sources onlyin upper level undergraduate or graduate classes.
What Do Faculty Think About Citations?
The majority of respondents(64%) indicate that students are required to create standard bibliographic citations for information sources in all classes.
A smaller majority (42%), however, indicate that they then reduce student grades for not adhering to a specific style when creating citations. 13% of respondents revealed that they did not reduce grades, while 23% chose “It depends.”
Of the faculty who reduce grades, most (62-66%) said that they reduce grades for errors such as missing elements, author errors, title errors, or formatting or placement errors. Slightly fewer faculty (47%) indicate that they reduce grades for incorrect page number, volume, date, etc.
Nearly all faculty (93%) provide some form of instruction or refer students to text, style manuals, and/or websites.
The most common sources of instruction were:
- Various style manuals and websites
- Library – LibGuides, library resources, instruction
- Purdue OWL
- Self-developed workshops/powerpoints/handouts
- Citation Manager – Word, Endnote, EasyBib, Zotero
- Writing Center handouts, website, and workshops
When asked about their department’s use of a standard bibliographic citation style, 76% of respondents said that there is a standard bibliographic style in their discipline and that people adhere to it.
What Do Faculty Think About the Quality of Sources?
The large majority of respondents indicate that they still expect and require the use of traditional information sources.
When asked about the types of sources they accept in student work, scholarly articles (97%) and books (95%) were the respondents’ preferred information sources.
Non-traditional sources were less acceptable, with faculty indicating that they do not accept social media (44%) or wikis (44%) as information sources. Websites create the largest gray area for faculty, with 52% indicating that “it depends” whether or not they will accept websites as information sources.
Faculty responded that they are most interested in their students evaluating information sources based ondate of publication appropriate to subject matter (84%) and relevance to the topic (84%).
Author’s credentials and variety in source selection were the next most required source evaluation criteria with just over 50% of respondents indicating that these criteria were required in students’ information sources.
Faculty were divided on the importance of students recognizing bias with 35% saying they require it of students, 31% saying they do not require it of students, and 34% saying “it depends.”
When asked if there was general agreement in their discipline about the grading practices of citation creation and source quality, 38% of respondents said that yes there was agreement, while 62% felt that there was not agreement in their discipline.