More on Acknowledging Sources

Remember that there are two major reasons for acknowledging sources used in your writing: to give credit to the people on whose ideas you draw (an ethical foundation), and to make your own writing more convincing by demonstrating the strength of your research (a persuasive foundation). You should always give your reader enough information so that she can identify and locate as easily as possibly your research material.

There are different formats for acknowledging sources. Some are very standardized, such as those used in formal academic papers. Some are less formal, such as those used in journalism or online. But the ethical and persuasive reasons for recognizing your sources still apply no matter the style of writing you choose.

Publishing online allows writers a relatively easy way to acknowledge sources using hypertext links. Readers can simply click on a link to identify and access your source material immediately. But even though a hyperlink can usually do this, it is still good practice to give enough information in the text of your writing to identify sources without requiring your reader to actually click a link.

Why? Because sometimes links go bad; sometimes people are reading a printed version of what's online and cannot follow a link, and sometimes people simply don't have the time or patience to follow your links. In any of these cases, your writing will be greatly improved if you remember always to briefly identify in text the sources for your material.

You may use a formal academic style to do this if you choose, but for most of our online writing I suggest using a less formal journalistic approach and, wherever possible, using a direct link as well. Something like this:

In "You Can Quote Me on That," an article published on the No Train, No Gain journalism coaching website, attributing sources is described as "the difference between research and plagiarism."

You'll notice that I link only to the article itself here and do not link, in addition, to the main website of the group publishing the article. That's because too many links can get confusing, and seeing as the link to the article begins with No Train, No Gain's main URL I decided that was enough information. Usually it is preferable to provide the name of an author of a source, but because the author is not clearly stated in this case, I attributed the material to the publishing organization instead.

How detailed you get in acknowledging a source must depend upon how much is needed to reasonably identify and locate the source, and on how you are using the source in your writing. The more central the source is to your material, the more detail you may want to provide.

Usually a citation like the model above would be sufficient for our purposes, but use your judgment and please ask me if you have any questions. And when in doubt, make sure to attribute as fully as possible. For more discussion of attribution, see the No Pain, No Gain article linked above and explore their main site for other resources. (Notice how I sneak in a link to this main site at another point in the article.)