Sign Printed with “Citation Needed “
Where do scholarly citations belong? Incorporated into the work which they were used to support? Or can an author safely (and ethically) compile and store those references, bibliographies, and footnotes on the web and still maintain high scholarly standards? That debate is once again rippling throughout higher education as a history author recently chose the Internet as the preferred means to feature his book’s notes. In his recent book The Invisible Bridge, Rick Perlstein did not include footnotes, end-notes, or anything of the kind. Instead he put all of these reference materials online at his site. This has caused some interesting dialogue regarding the practice.
One the one hand there are voices crying out for innovation and increased access to the research components that make up scholarly works. One the other hand, critics are wary of separating references from the greater officially bound corpus of the work which they support. If one has to go to another venue to access the end notes of a particular material, opponents of the internet practice fear the reader will be less likely to follow up on research materials and broaden their own reading.
It brings to mind shifting interpretations of adjacency and “location” in the increasing digital domain of publishing. With the transition from traditional print to digital media forms the lines are becoming more blurred between the two.
There are economic concerns driving the debate as well. Publishers have at times pressured authors to consider online citations to save pages in the printed work, reducing publishing costs. Some academics rankle at the notion of sacrificing traditionally formatted reference material in order to cut costs. The practice is not common, and while cost was not a consideration in Perlstien’s case, the issue has brought a long simmering debate more prominently to the forefront. It remains to be seen how this will be resolved and what the longer term implications will be.
Photo attributed to www.futureatlas.com, used under Creative Commons 2.0 license.
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