Why we cite sources

Released: Feb 2013
Features: 3:22 min, english subtitles

Review: It’s a short humorous cartoon movie providing some reasons why we cite information sources in academia. In the story there are two kinds of students introduced: one that did plagiarism and one that get himself help at the library. Understood, the second one has success. The basic message is quite simple: don’t copy & paste, go to the library and start early. But why?

1. Using someone else’s work saves your time. Other scientists have done long lasting research and you can just take the answers and arguments they provide out of their papers. Citing is the way to publicly say thank you for that.
2. Citing is helping your readers to use the same source or to connect with the original providers of the information.
3. It’s a matter of responsibility. The citation is a signal that the provider of the original source is responsible that the experiment in the lab was conducted correctly or the archival source was deciphered accurately.