Citation Woes

Hm. I am bummed. I just got word that a nursing student has threatened to file a grievance against one of the nursing faculty. The student received a poor grade on a paper due to the ridiculously non-APA citations she submitted.

The student alleges that a librarian told her that the citations were fine. She also claims that “some program” made the citations for her. I’m looking at the student’s works cited list and I can confidently say that she may have used various citation helps that came from within different databases, but no single tool generated these cockamamie citations.

Having said that, I don’t believe the student was intentionally doing anything untoward (despite the fact that her first citation comes from Homer & Simpson, 2007). When I check in Academic Search Premier, sure enough the database is generating incorrect APA citations. Each citation the student gave has the exact same flaw in the date section.  This tells me that she decided that Ebsco should do a better job than she would of providing citations and she went back and edited each of hers to match the date formatting given by the database.

Sigh. Add to this that only some of the Ebsco suite of databases provide DOIs for APA citations and others stilll use a Database name and retrieval date and we’ve got an intensely sticky situation. Others of our databases just don’t provide citation assistance–in the past that really vexed me but now I’m kind of wishing that none of them did if this is how it’s going to go.

One of our library faculty has suggested that we propose to all subject faculty who assign APA that they just accept incorrect APA citations until such time as the databases have caught up but I find that idea deplorable. You’ll be hard-pressed to convince me to teach students to do things incorrectly just because it saves a headache in the long run.

I have a lot more to think and say about citation styles, but first I need to finish prepping my talk for tomorrow. You can find me at the 2009 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit, where I’ll be speaking about creating buy-in for new reference mediums.