 Welcome to the BC Library's Core Skills Tutorial, Citation 1. Why CITE? The first in a two-part series. This video will explain why it's important to cite your sources, different purposes of citation, and what happens to knowledge and academic careers when citation is incomplete or missing. For learning how to cite, watch Citation 2, How to Cite. When you cite your sources, you show how your work is in conversation with the work of other scholars. This is the essential feature of academic writing, showing your familiar with what's already been said and adding to it, just like you might with a conversation. Citing fulfills several purposes. It lends the authority of prominent scholars to your claims and at the same time gives them credit for their original ideas. It gives you a chance to add your own commentary to existing knowledge and provides a way for your readers to understand the scholarly context of your ideas. Citations also provide all of the information your readers need to locate the sources you have used. In this way, your research keeps the conversation going by encouraging further research. Think of citation as the web of knowledge before the worldwide web. In print, without clickable links, how did people connect related ideas? With citations, it was slow, but it worked. So, with the internet and links, why do people still use it? Because citation is about more than just linking information, it's also about building knowledge with authority, credit, commentary, and context. Here's a quote with an incomplete citation. There's an author, but no publication or date. The source on the photo might seem authentic, but where did this quote come from? You could Google it, but Google can't fail you. The truth is that Churchill never said that. Richard Langworth, a Churchill expert, has published five books of Churchill quotes. Should we trust him or Brainy quote? When you don't cite or citing completely, you add noise, not knowledge. What else is lost without a citation? Credit. The more scholars cited, the more grants, prestige, and job prospects she's awarded. As you might imagine, this prestige process can be quite competitive and tempt people to cheat. Consider Watson and Crick, credited for discovering the double-helix shape of DNA in 1953, who then shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1962. In their April 1953 article in the prestigious journal Nature, they referred to another article in the same issue with similar claims. We were not aware of the details of the results presented there when we devised our structure, which rests mainly, though not entirely, on published experimental data. In other words, they claimed credit for the double-helix idea. Rosalind Franklin's pioneering work with DNA was published on the next two pages in the same issue of Nature. She was a cautious, thorough scientist, and her claims about the shape of DNA were more understated. She wrote of Watson and Crick's concurrent article. Thus, our general ideas are now inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and Crick in the preceding communication. She credited them, they did not credit her. Her major contributions to the discovery of DNA went largely uncredited until 20 years after her untimely death at the age of 37. When the book made it clear that Watson and Crick had seen her research and data and even talked to her colleague about it. Not fair, right? The historical record has been partially corrected. A book, several documentaries, and a Broadway play have publicized her contributions. But the record of citations and awards still eclipses her. Your citation habits in unpublished papers likely will not have profound impacts on scholar's careers. But by having you practice citation, your professors are teaching you ethical habits that, source by source, build the record of all academic knowledge. It's kind of profound, really. Most of what counts as knowledge comes down to the authority of these troublesome little condensed strings of text, often representing someone else's most significant creative output or sometimes even a life's work. To learn how to mindfully attend to citations, watch the second video in this series. Citation 2, How to Cite.