Citations Theories

Citations are widely recognized as being an important and distinctive property of academic texts. As a consequence, the presence or absence of citations allows the casual reader to get an immediate sense of whether a text is an “academic” or “popular” one. Because citation is such an obvious surface phenomenon, it has been much discussed in the academic world. Indeed, there are several theories about the role and purpose of citations in academic texts.

In this text we present six theories about why academic authors use citations and propose a classification according to the main purpose of the citation usage: 1) theories that consider the author as a passive recipient of external expectations or requirements – Passive Author and 2) theories that view the author as an agent strategically designing the text to affect the readers in a particular way – Active Author.

1) Passive Author

In this group, citations are used to satisfy formal or ethical requirements within the academic community that the citing author belongs.

a) Citations are used to show respect to previous scholars; they recognize the history of the field by acknowledging previous achievements.

b) Citations operate as a mutual reward system where authors give credit to someone else’s work expecting to receive the same treatment in return (Ravetz, 1971).

c) Citations are used to recognize and acknowledge intellectual property rights. Academic authors are not only ethically, but essentially legally required to cite previous works in their fields.

There is a gradual enforcement transition among these three theories regarding the necessity of citation usage in academic papers, departing from a) a loose ethical requirement to b) ethics with additional further interest (reward expectation) to c) legal requirement.

2) Active Author

In this group, citations are considered to be used as a writing strategy, to make author’s argument more compelling or to create a familiar “environment” to the reader, providing smother transition from previous readings to the current citing text.

a) Citations are tools of persuasion; writers use citations to give their statements greater authority (Gibert, 1977).

b) Citations are use to demonstrate a sort of familiarity with the field, showing the reader that the author belongs to a particular scholarly community (Bavelas, 1978).

c) Citations are used to present the reader a research niche within one particular literature which will be occupied by the citing author. By describing what has been done, citations point the way to what has not been done and prepare a space for a new research (Swales, 1990).