The cruft of scholarship

One of the assignments that I gave to the students in my first-year tutorial last fall was a set of four exercises in citation, taken from Academic honesty: Scholarly integrity, collaboration, and the ethical use of sources, a booklet that the College produces to train students to practice the ways of honest scholarship and avoid charges of plagiarism or improper collaboration. In each of these exercises, the booklet's authors supply a passage from a published work and ask the student to write a paragraph containing an apposite use of that passage, a well-formed in-line citation at the point of reference, and a bibliographical entry, such as might appear in a list of works cited at the end of a scholarly paper.

As I discovered when I started grading the students' papers, however, the exercises presented some interesting and unexpected difficulties: The Academic honesty booklet itself, in identifying the sources of the passages, gives misleading, incomplete, and occasionally even inaccurate information about them. The students synthesized their citations and bibliography entries from the information given in the booklet, without checking it against the original sources, so none of them obtained correct results; and, not unexpectedly, many of them added another layer of misquotation and error.

The more I investigated the various difficulties that stand in the way of accurate scholarly citation of scholarly works, the more complicated and fragile the whole system came to seem. The author of one of the passages gave the title of his own essay incorrectly on one of his Web pages; another author's Web page misspelled the name of his book's designer and left a word out of the name of its publisher. It was a depressing experience.

I've now written an essay (called “Check your references”) in which most of the gory details are presented from the viewpoint of an arrogant, hyperpedantic curmudgeon. Here's the concluding paragraph:

For this reason, it's a bad idea to ask our first-year students to assemble bibliography entries from secondary sources in the first place: We're encouraging them to form a unscholarly habit that leads to the propagation of errors! The next time my students do an academic-honesty exercise, I'll require them to collect all the bibliographical information themselves, from primary sources.