Referencing – and the
referencing perfection complex.
There is one thing that I really remember about my first
week at university as an undergrad. I sat in lectures, in every single one of
my four classes, where the academics up the front tried to scare me blind about
the consequences of plagiarism and ‘bad referencing’. Not only could incorrect
referencing harm my grades, but sage nods and stern faces accompanied the
assurance that if I did not reference correctly it would also harm both my
academic reputation and career. Understandably, and very quickly, I developed a
reference perfection complex. I bought the referencing handbooks for all of the
referencing styles that I ‘might’ ever be asked to use and I struggled to adhere
to them with painful detail. I learnt all about commas and semi colons and the
correct positioning of initials and titles. I became an expert in italics and
positioning brackets in paragraphs. Yet, for all my attempts at gramatic
perfection, my natural inclination towards free flowing writing could not be
suppressed and what my lecturers had once assured me were ‘career damaging’
errors in citation continued to be found hiding on my pages. No matter how hard
I tried, there was always at least one comma that was out of place. While my
mind was thriving on the intellectual content of my assignments, my inner child
was throwing a temper tantrum over my inability to just get it right.
A few years in to my studies, I was feeling particularly
down. I had an assignment to write that was not going well and I just could not
find the evidence to prove that what I believed to be correct was true. It was
late at night, in the back of the library- just me, the security guard
wandering outside and the incessant buzzing of the fluorescent lights. I was
reading through the third page of references for a dry, government report when
I found it-
In the middle of a government report- published by a well
reputed government organisation, there was a glaring error: the author of the
report had put their own email address at the end of a completely unrelated reference.
Seeing that referencing error in a government report really brought something
home for me. I had an ‘ah ha’ moment in the lonely library. When people talk
about referencing as being important- it is. But when people talk about
referencing as being the ‘be all and end all’ of an academic career- it isn’t.
You can still get a job with well-respected government organisations even if
you make a tiny referencing mistake- or a massive one! So don’t let your lack
of DOI numbers get you down. Never stop learning.
Send us pictures of your biggest referencing fails to share
the academic struggle.
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