Dear Colleagues,

We had a brief thread here last July about the issue of references and citations. I have been thinking on this since. This is an important issue in research training.

This is more than formalism. Learning to manage references well involves developing specific skills and knowledge. These skills require systematic, critical use of the literature. Students who apply analytical skills to the literature of a field develop a deeper and more thorough understanding of the field than students who do not. What is true for students is true for doctoral candidates, for professional researchers and for scholars.

This month, I refereed several papers for a conference on industrial design education. My experience mirrored past experiences with design research papers. Over the past year, I have reviewed papers for conferences, journals, and for books. One of the common problems I have noticed has been an inability to manage references.

For this last batch, I wrote the proceedings editor to ask about the problem. Of five papers, one was outstanding despite a few formal flaws, two have good potential, one had possibilities, and one was impossibly bad.

The outstanding paper might get by without proper management of references. With them, it would be an excellent paper. More important - for the reasons I explain below - better management of references would make the paper more useful to readers. Better references help the writer to convey information to readers in a way that enables them to transform it more easily into effective knowledge.

When I brought these issues to the editor's attention, I received an interesting reply. The editor's reply stated her experience that problems in design papers are common. All authors for this specific project received guidelines on format and how to manage references. Examples were given. Hardly, anyone followed the guidelines. The editor made a strong effort to get the organizers to agree that papers should be refereed to bring a more scholarly approach to the design disciplines. Even so, she had difficulty conveying the value of this approach to the designers involved in the conference. She even experienced difficulty explaining these issues to design educators.

She noted that referencing is a serious problem for all papers in the book. She and her colleagues teach these skills in the research program within their own industrial design course. She notes that few design programs in academic institutions do so.

I want to bring this issue forward to the readers of this list. Research training requires that these issues be given appropriate attention.

The skills we teach to our students become the skills of our profession. They also become the skills that influence the growth of our field in the university context.

We are now developing a culture for design research and academic publishing. Those who teach design research must consider these issues. So must those who organize conferences. Those of us who edit books and journals should push authors to manage their sources properly.

It is important to raise these issues with research students and research writers.

I observe two major problems.

The first is a relaxed attitude toward references in the in-text citation. The tendency to a relaxed style means that references are cited by author and year alone without attention to the location of a fact or an argument.

The second problem involves incomplete or inaccurate references in the reference list.

The reason for complete, accurate references is easy to understand.

The general rule of bibliographic reference is that a reference must offer the complete information that permits a reader to find the item cited. If the cited item is part of a larger work, the reference must make it possible to locate the exact spot in the larger work where the item appears. This enables the reader to consider, evaluate, and compare the ideas of the author in relation to their sources.

The reason for attention to the specific location of ideas or issues at the proper point where they occur WHITHIN a cited work is more subtle, but equally important.

Where a citation refers to the overall theme of a work, a loose reference is acceptable. Where the reference is to a specific issue stated at a specific point, care is best.

When authors rest methodological choices or evidentiary assertions on external authorities, the reader has a right to know who wrote it and where.

An author should not ask that readers to leaf through a 275-page book to locate an assertion found on a single page within that book. It is the responsibility of a scholar to provide the evidence in readily usable form.

As a reader, I expect scholarly and scientific authors to do the author's proper work by providing complete evidence for the sources they cite.

This problem affects many of the papers and presentations I have been seeing in design research.

Where an author has clear and obvious mastery of subject matter, it generally does not represent a major problem. Relatively few of our scholars have true mastery of their material, however, and one reason for the lack of mastery is the failure to work closely with evidence. Poor referencing is a symptom. Since good referencing requires the author to read closely and carefully, good referencing is part of the cure.

Good referencing does not require people to think well, but it does force them to attend to the material with which they work. When thoughtful people work carefully with material, they tend naturally to think and work better as a result.

There are seven good reasons for good referencing and solid citation skills. The first two involve the scholarly standards with the field. The next five involve the scholar's own development.

1) Rhetorical development and narrative

Good references creatively underpin an argument. They provide evidence, they help to develop narrative flow, and they anchor the argument in the larger body of the field.

This aspect of the reference or the footnote is rhetorical.

A reference should be appropriate and well chosen. The cited source must itself meet proper standards of quality and evidence. A document to which an author refers must itself be subject to inspection and review in just the same way that the document in hand must be.

For a reference to fulfill its rhetorical function, it must therefore meet the requirement of evidence.

2) Demonstration of evidence for public inspection or debate

Rhetorically, well-structured footnotes with proper location of source permit the reader to examine for himself the claims and warrants of the author. This is the foundation of scholarship in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.

I would say this is more important in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences. In the natural sciences, much knowledge is axiomatic or immediately derivable from well-known principles. Many of these are set forth in common books of tables and data. While there are disagreements on the interpretations of data, the data are generally accepted. This is not so in the humanities or social sciences.

In the natural sciences, it is also possible to test. This is somewhat true in the social sciences. This is not the case in the humanities.

Reasoned discourse in the humanities -- and often in the social sciences -- depends more on ideas than on external data. Evidence depends on the record of prior ideas and earlier chains of arguments.

When I assert that Papanek says something, and that I base part of my argument on Papanek, I owe it to my reader to allow him or her to inspect Papanek for himself.

This means I must give a complete and full citation. He or she must be able to find the document, and locate the point within the document at which Papanek raises the point under consideration. (This issue often escapes people in design research. It is not enough to get Papanek's book if the issue at hand is located in a paragraph that occurs in the middle of a 296-page volume.)

Research in every field demands that anyone who offers a claim must provide or give access to the evidence that substantiates the claim.

This evidence must be made available and public.

In axiomatized fields such as mathematics, nearly everyone can be presumed to have access or know the prior steps in some kinds of arguments. In those cases, it may not be necessary to refer to every past author. The data alone are enough.

In any field where people from several fields are likely to enter the discourse, it is vital to provide all evidence.

This is particularly the case in design research, where we come from so many backgrounds.

Establishing such requirements will improve the field in general. It renders material more usable to readers from inside and outside the field. It raises the standard of scholarship for the field and scholars both. This includes requiring that people read material and use evidence more effectively than I have seen in many of the conference papers I have been reviewing.

We are seeing a fair number of graduated scholars who have been granted doctorates without having mastered basic research and writing skills. It is my view that our journal editors and conference committees should require that they meet these standards before offering a platform for their work.

Proper use of sources and effective documentation of evidence is the basis of scholarship and science in all fields. Making evidence available is the standard of reasoned argument in every arena where we require a higher standard of argument that mere personal authority.

Some people argue that this takes too much time and raises the barrier to publication and presentation to an artificially high level.

I argue that the time is the time required is the time that proper scholarship demands. These are not arcane skills or difficult skills. We master them with practice and coaching. My first-year students master these skills as one element in their term paper.

Graduated doctors cannot argue that they are unable to master skills that are expected of first-year students at university. They may argue that their knowledge is so great that these skills are superfluous, but the evidence of three papers in four suggests otherwise.

It seems to me that requiring these skills sets a platform, rather than raising an artificial barrier. Right now, too many design venues are publishing people and permitting presentations that would be considered below standard in most other fields.

3) Learning to read effectively

Learning to manage sources accurately and well is the foundation of good research.

A student who is required to cite properly must learn to read effectively to do so. He or she thus masters the relevant literature. This does not ensure breadth or a broader view, but it does require that he or she learn to read accurately, and argue correctly from source literature.

4) Learning to argue from evidence

In learning to write a proper citation, a scholar also learns essential skills in constructing argument from evidence.

5) Learning to evaluate evidence

In learning these skills, a scholar also begins to understand what another author intends in using evidence.

6) Critical thinking and analytical skills

Understanding how to cite, and understanding what one reads when reading a citation also teaches scholars to read with greater analytical and critical attention.

Writing a citation is a technical skill. Learning to read a citation involves technical skills and critical thinking.

Using these skills as steps toward critical thinking and analytical attention is more than a technical skill. This involves scholarship. These technical skills help those who master them to become better scholars.

7) Breadth of knowledge

Finally, these skills promote breadth of knowledge.

A scholar who begins to think critically and analytically is no longer satisfied with a single source of evidence. A scholar who thinks critically is unsatisfied with the kinds of weak evidence that uncritical readers accept.

To think critically requires more evidence in addition to better use of evidence. Scholars who develop these skills tend to read more widely than scholars who do not. As a result, they master their field better.

8) General improvement to research skills

Scholars who have these skills do better work.

These are simple skills. They take work and practice, but they are not difficult to understand.

We all face this problem. We write up our research to communicate and share ideas. The skill with which we communicate affects the impact we have.

I will offer a specific recent case to make my point.

The conference on doctoral education in design at La Clusaz, France, attracted a reasonably high level of quality in submissions. One reason for this was our care and insistence on applying the guidelines. There were a few problem areas nonetheless, comparable to those I have seen elsewhere.

The reason these problems do not affect the proceedings is that we insisted that deficiencies be remedied before publication. Diligent engagement by skilled referees was one important factor. Another was outstanding editorial management by David Durling and his colleagues at Staffordshire University.

As a result, we have a uniformly high standard among the published papers. There are a few examples of loose reference style, but this is a general problem in all fields. In many cases, this involves a matter of judgment, and where papers are clear, comprehensible, and well argued, a wise editor defers to the author's judgment. In every other respect, references are accurate, complete, and correct.

The quality of the proceedings has given the La Clusaz proceedings a level of impact far beyond our expectations.

We expected and we have had great interest among design research programs and among design departments involved in or planning doctoral programs. We have also had requests from senior university officials at the rector and vice chancellor level, government officials in ministries of education, and research centers investigating issues of doctoral education and advanced research training in the professions.

The impact of this book clearly rests on the quality of contributions by many outstanding authors. Part of this quality is the clarity of writing and communication. This clarity was encouraged by attention to editorial quality and by attention to format, and to proper management of references, and citations.

If any subscribers to this list wish to pursue these issues further, Ellen Young and I are developing a reference guide and I have been writing an article on the logic of good referencing. The guide is not done, but an earlier version that I developed with the librarians at my school contains many of the basics. If you would like copies of these to share with your students and colleagues, I would be happy to send them over as attachments.

Just send me an email at the address:

ken.friedman@bi

Place the word

Citations

in the subject header.

Best regards,

Ken Friedman

Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Technology and Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management

Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University