Re: Plagiarism, credit, and culture-reply, reply, reply

[Beth Rapp Young <youngbr@email.uah.edu>]

Can't resist chiming in on this thread.

I think the difference between citations in scholarly work and in
Time, faculty handbooks, etc., reflects writers' perception
of the differing needs of readers, not hypocrisy on the part of the
writers.  

When I'm researching something, I'm likely to look for the citations
in order to retrace the research trail (maybe there are some crumbs of
useful information which the author didn't pick up?) and in many cases
(as Carl so eloquently points out) to help determine the credibility
of the source. 

In _Time_, which most people read for entertainment & not scholarly
research, sources are rarely cited unless there's a chance the average
reader will want to look them up, such as URLs in website reviews and
book titles in book reviews, etc.  

I read a Boston Review article on the web yesterday in which the
author casually tossed off references to Yates, Medea, Shakespeare,
Wes Craven, Plato, and dozens of others, with no citations.  I think
this author was trying to entertain us with his dazzling display of
cultural literacy (and we could play the game with him--do we know all
those quotes?)  Also, since the article was about gore in popular
culture, his showing off of knowledge put the lie to stereotypes about
those who enjoy gore.  Yet the books and films he mentioned  which
were in print, and which were also gory, were listed, complete with
author/director and ISBN, at the beginning of the article.

Would the average person want to look up the source of a faculty
handbook?  Or, perhaps more to the point, would the average
administrator want us to look up the source of the faculty handbook,
and find out, perhaps how (not) well a passage worked at a different
university?  Hmmmmmmm.


Beth Young

Dr. Beth Rapp Young
U of Alabama in Huntsville
YoungBR@email.uah.edu