This Chapter defines Citations, Citation Standards/Style Manuals and Scholarly Communication. It explains the importance of Scholarly Communication, and use of Citations in meeting the objectives of Scholarly Communication, especially in avoiding the accidental danger of plagiarism. It also explains how Bibliographic Management Systems (software)—both open / free and proprietary—have been helpful to the academics and researchers in providing standard methods of citations that is, both in-text citations and references list at the end of the text of the document while writing documents. It concludes by emphasizing the need for use of standard citation or style manual for proper dissemination of scholarly communications. There is a need for gaining adequate knowledge on how to cite and provide references in correct form in the publications to make them quality and scholarly works and also to avoid from the accidental danger of plagiarism.
TopScholarly Communication
The dictionary meaning of the term ‘scholarly’ means ‘Academic’ or ‘having lot of knowledge’, and scholarly communication means systematic, honest, understandable, reachable and shareable knowledge communication to the intended people with the same spirit and emphasis as desired by the authors or creators of such information.
Association of Research Libraries (ARL), USA defines Scholarly communication as ‘the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.’ It includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs. Scholarly communication, therefore, includes discovery and creation of knowledge, dissemination, preservation, and its re-use. All these aspects of scholarly communication are the concerns of today’s libraries for their success.
Importance of Scholarly Communication
Scholarly communication is meant for quality in scholarly publications. Further, “Scholarly communication is seen as a crucial part of research, and researchers - many of whom are lecturers and academics at universities - are often judged by their academic output and list of publications. Promotions will normally take into account the number of publications and how prestigious the journals they were published in (e.g. Nature and The Lancet are seen as very prestigious journals within the sciences). A researcher's publication list will help create them a reputation within their discipline” (Wikipedia)
TopCitations
A citation or bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, or part of a book, an article, a web page or other published item, with sufficient details to allow a reader to locate it. In economics parlance, citation is a’ formal acknowledgement of intellectual debit to earlier sources of information’ (Merton, 1983; Kochen, 1987). They are meant for linking association of concepts or theories of others with the work that is now being written by some other. The reasons why one has to cite in his / her document are many.
They can be: