For to long I am studying and one thing that has bugged me forever is citing. Many teachers and professors want the list of cited sources perfect according to the citing rules. If you mess this up to much the paper will not even graded. I think there's an easy way to change all this and I wonder why it isn't in use yet.
Usually I try to use the apa norm (as much as possible), but this has a couple disadvantages:
1) Many different people, many different interpretations of the apa citing rules.
There are quite alot of different resources that can be cited: books, websites, emails, reports, etc and they all have their own way of being noted in the resource list. And the reference intext: was it (Jones, 2006) or (Boeing Research, 2006)? Do your fellow groupmembers also interprete the apa in the same way?
2) It can be difficult to find the needed information.
So who exactly wrote this nameless article on that website? Is this a co-author I should mention? In what *&^%*^%* year has this article been written? it must be somewhere!
3) Writing the referencelist can be time consuming Yes, there is textsoftware that can create this somewhat automatically. But they are often not compatible with Open Office for instance. And again it requires filling in the information.
So why not ake things easier and turn it around: not the person who uses the source has to write down the reference in a perfect way, but the author of the source has to!
Example: Bert Schmertstra writes an article for a magazine about the increasing number of bikes being stolen in Amsterdam lately. At the top of the article (or the end) he writes the correct way to cite his source. In this case:
Schmertstra, B. (2009, June 3). Bikes, they are like liquid steel. Bikes and Buddism, 113(4), x-x.
So whenever I use his article all I have to do is: - type it over - copy paste from internet
Also each website should post the correct way to cite their articles (in a generic way). Example: "If you want to cite from our website use: Animals Behaviour Institute. (2003). (title). Retrieved (date) from (url)
Advantage: - the author only once has to write the perfect way to cite his work, instead of 100 people citing (=effort + room for mistake)
- the author has the responsility to use a document with the standard citing rules (is there worldwide consensus? let's create it!) - isnt it nice when people cite correct to your work?
- most scientific work and general information is found online. So all you have to do is copy-paste the "how to cite me" text, adapt the pagenumber and other info and you are done!
