15 How to Document Sources, Observe Copyright, and Provide Acknowledgments

Many academicians would rather discuss where to buy a cemetery plot than discuss how to cite secondary sources. In comparison to the inherently interesting nature of the creative process, the nuts and bolts of documenting sources seem insignificant and tedious. Yet the careers of some mighty academicians have crashed and burned because they failed to pay attention to the intricacies of Source documentation and copyright law. As a result, I discuss in is chapter how to avoid plagiarism, how to copyright manuscripts, how to arrange for permissions, and how to provide appropriate acknowledgments.

HOW TO DOCUMENT SOURCES
Unfortunately, each discipline has its own standards for how to cite material. While interdisciplinary work would be much simpler if scholars could agree on one or two major citation systems, presently dozens of citation systems are endorsed by various professional organizations. For example, English teachers and scholars involved in composition and rhetoric follow the guidelines prescribed by the Modem Language Association (MLA). In turn, psychologists and others in the social sciences follow those established by the American Psychological Association (APA). The bible for editors of scholarly journals and university presses is The Chicago Manual of Style. Biologists use The Council of Biology Editors Style Manual. Many lawyers use Harvard Law Review’s A Uniform System of Citation. Chemists follow The American Chemical Society’s Handbook for Authors. And engineers have numerous style formats to choose from, such as the Engineers’ Joint Council’s Recommended Practice for Style of References in Engineering Publications, the American Society for Mechanical Engineering MS_4: An ASME Paper, or the American Institute of Industrial Engineers’ The Complete Guide for Writing Technical Articles. Regardless of the details about where periods, commas, and parentheses should be placed, all citation systems have one goal in mind: to ensure that authors acknowledge the work of other scholars whom they have cited or been significantly influenced by. In addition, citation systems enable scholars to review bibliographies and thereby become thoroughly informed about a subject.
If you write in a discipline that publishes journals requiring different forms of documentation, you may want to inquire among your peers whether a software program is available that can automatically translate documentation styles. For example, WP Citation allows users of WordPerfect 5.1 to generate bibliographies in over 400 publishing styles, such as Chicago, MLA, or Turabian. (This program is available from Oberon Resources, 147 East Oakland Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43201_1208, 1_800_243-3833.)
Because disciplines have different guidelines for listing author, place, and date of publication, these matters will not be reviewed in detail here. Instead, I discuss below the conventions for documenting sources that transcend disciplinary boundaries. In particular, I encourage you to avoid excessive quoting, to ensure that you do not mistakenly quote a secondary source when paraphrasing, to introduce the context and credibility of references, and to power quote to establish a persuasive persona.

A VOID EXCESSIVE QUOTING
Academicians do not want to read miscellaneous quotes thrown together helter_skelter. Documents that rely extensively on quotes tend to lack voice or authority. If you place quotes after every few lines, your ideas and voice take second stage to other people ‘ s ideas and voices, which contradicts your reason for writing to share your thoughts. Although no firm guideline can be prescribed, stylists often suggest limiting direct quotes to 10 percent of the total length of your document.
You will, however, occasionally find it useful to quote directly. For example, you might want to provide a direct quote if the material goes to the heart of your discussion or argument; if it is so well written that it cannot be condensed further; if it contains an eyewitness account of an event; or if it is written by a prestigious scholar whose comments are crucial to your purpose.

ENSURE THAT PARAPHRASED SECTIONS ARE ACCURATE AND PROPERLY CITED
When you paraphrase another scholar’s original ideas, you must acknowledge your indebtedness. This does not mean, however, that you should cite everything you read. Instead, you need to determine whether a particular insight is considered given information by other scholars in the field. In other words, if many scholars are expressing similar ideas or insights, then you may be able to consider this information to be public domain information. ~hen in doubt about whether an insight is unique to a particular scholar~ however, you should cite the scholar.
Also, when reviewing your paraphrased passages, check to enSure that you have not repeated any phrases from the secondary SoUrce without putting quotation marks around them. If you have read an article many times by another scholar, you can easily repeat the syntax and word choice without being aware of it, so it truly makes sense to take a second look at the original source. Taking three or more words from a secondary source amounts to more than sloppy scholarship: it is plagiarism. Naturally, you should also ensure that you have not misrepresented the secondary source by omitting the context or crucial qualifiers from the direct quote or in your paraphrased statement.

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Figure 15.1
Sample Draft & Critical Reading Questions
Gilligan investigates women’s moral development, concluding that women «make different sense of their experience, based on their knowledge of human relationships” (172). Furthermore, Gilligan asserts that «a recognition of the differences in women’s experiences and understanding expands our views of maturity and points to the contextual nature of developmental truthsn (174). Women, as connected knowers, prefer to find their voices “through open_ended, exploratory, often autobiographical writing in which [they] assume a sympathetic audience (Lamb 11). Belenky et al. describe five epistemological positions that characterize women’s waysofknowing. Based upon interviews with women only, their research offers an alternative perspective toWilliam Perry’s epistemological positions derived from male students at Harvard.
If women “make different sense of their experience” and construct knowledge differently from men, might women not write differently as well? Elizabeth A. Flynn concludes that in narrative writing, at least, they do. In “Composition as a Woman,” Flynn analyzes the narratives of four students (two males and two females), discovering that the females’ narratives were characterized byinteraction, connection, or frustrated connection while the males’ were characterized by separation, achievement, or frustrated achievement (428).
As skilled critical readers, academicians would probably ask “Who is Gilligan? What methods did Gilligan use to investigate women’s moral development?”
Here they might ask “How so?” and ‘What does this mean?”
Here critical readers might wonder what cultures Lamb studied before reaching such a profound generalization.

How did Belenky et al. derive “five epistemological positions” and how are these positions different from Perry’s epistemological positions?”
Here critical readers might wonder whether the author has exaggerated Flynn’s conclusions. After all, many scholars are reluctant to assume a universal truth based on a sample size of four. In addition, academicians would probably want to hear more about how Flynn judged the female narratives as “characterized by interaction,” etc.
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INTRODUCE THE CONTEXTAND CREDIBILITY OF REFERENCES
Academicians expect scholars to provide some background information about the research studies that they review. Without this information, readers may be unsure about the value of the reviewed studies. In Figure 15.1, extracted from a draft of one of my students’ dissertation proposals, note how the lack of content development causes awkward transitions between ideas and undercuts the author’s credibility. Because the author fails to give the necessary background about the studies she reviews, her discussion seems choppy and illogical. Many of the problems in this passage could be solved by a brief introduction concisely summarizing each scholar’s credentials and research methods. Introductions of this sort are also crucial in highlighting exactly when you ~re incorporating someone else’s ideas into your discussion.
With the hopes of swaying a reader, gifted rhetoricians sometimes intentionally avoid clarifying the context of research studies that they cite to support their positions. In his critique of higher ed ucation, ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education, note how Charles Sykes fails to explain how Finn reached hls conclusion that only one in ten professors makes significant Contributions. By rushing on in his argument with the playful Comment “he was being charitable,” Sykes avoids a thoughtful discussion of how a significant contribution is defined, how scholars build on past essays as they mature, and how many studies Finn made before reaching his damning conclusion:
The debate over higher education often pits teaching versus research. But that begs the question, because it presupposes that the professors really do as much research as they claim and that the research they do actually has value….
But how much research is really being done? And is it worth anything? Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn posed those same questions a few years back, before he went to work for the government. Of the 850,000 working academics in the country, Finn asked, how many really make any contribution to the “enlargement of human knowledge”? After eliminating the “horde of papers, articles, and books whose publication or presentation accomplished nothing save, perhaps, forthe author’s curricula vitae,” Finn estimated that the answer would be that only 1 in 10 professors makes any contribution at all.2
He was being charitable. But Finn was highlighting one of the most embarrassing facts in the academic culture. Although the assumption that professors are busily at work on the frontiers of knowledge is the justification for their featherweight teaching loads, 60 percent of all college faculty members have never written or edited a book and one_third have never published even a single journal article.3

To his credit, we must acknowledge that Sykes does provide footnotes for Finn ‘s assertion that few professors write and that the bulk of what they write is garbage. By tuming to footnote two at the back of the book, the reader is provided with the following reference:

2. Finn, Chester, “HigherEducation on Trial: An Indictment,” Current, October 1984.

In turn, Sykes provides the following reference for his assertion that professors carry “featherweight teaching loads” and that “60 percent of all college faculty members have never written or edited a book and one_third have never published even a single journal article.”

3. Isoue, Robert, “How Colleges Can Cut Costs,” Wall Street Journal, January 27, 1987.

Publication of these conclusions in a significant newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal or a periodical like Current establishes some credibility. Note, however, the absence of page numbers for these references and it’s clear that a good amount of research will be needed to determine how reliable Finn’s and Isoue’s assertions are. Because few readers are willing to give hours to researching the authenticity of evidence, it is usually best to provide some background information when making controversial assertions.

For example, when reading the excerpt from Finn cited above, critical academic readers would want to know whether Finn read all of the “horde of papers, articles, and books” that the 850,000 working academics published. If so, how many years did this task take? If he reviewed a sample of these scholars’ work, what steps did he take to ensure that it represented trends in the population? Did he limit his database to 85,000 papers, articles, and books published in 1983? What criteria did he use to evaluate the quality of the scholars’ work? What has prepared Finn to evaluate manuscripts from such diverse disciplines as physics, mathematics, medicine, and engineering? Is Finn a scholarly author or an established editor of a scholarly journal?
Perhaps the most important question a critical reader might ask is, “Did Finn evaluate the evolution of each scholar’s work over time?” After all, given the generative nature of language, it seems reasonable to assume that weak essays can emerge into stronger ones or help scholars improve as writers and researchers. The point has often been made, for example, that Darwin ‘ s early monographs on bamacle taxonomy (written between the ages of 37 and 45) hardly reflected the brilliant mind that would later reshape our conception of human evolution (Diamond; Boyer).
In turn, critical academic readers would have greater faith in Isoue’s 1987 statistics if more background information about the sampling methodology were provided. Ultimately, however, many academic readers would dismiss the results of even a statistically valid average of “all college faculty members” on the basis that community college professors have different responsibilities than university professors at research institutions. Ultimately, few academic readers, I suspect, would consider the community college professor’s 5_5 teaching load to be a featherweight load.

POWER QUOTE TO ESTABLISH A PERSUASIVE PERSONA
One of the conventions for introductions is to bow to predecessors and acknowledge your indebtedness to their ground_breaking, seminal research. If space limitations prohibit you from discoursing at length on the various works that contributed to your thinking on a subject, you can gather them together under the umbrella of a general, inclusive statement, as demonstrated in the samples below:

A number of researchers (Bellack, Kliebard, Hyman, & Smith 1966; Cazden, John, & Hymes, 1972; Barnes, 1969; Flanders, 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1978) have analyzed the language of classrooms and have come to the common conclusion that students have access to a limited number of language functions. (Gere and Abbott 374_375)

In recent years, several reader response theorists (Bleich, 1975, 1978; Culler, 1975; Fish, 1970, 1 976a, 1 976b; Holland, 1973, 1 975a, 1 975b; Rosenblatt, 1976, 1978) have explored the unique role of the reader in the literary experience. Among the variety of explanations for the respective roles of the reader and text in the creation of meaning, some studies have demonstrated that readers’ cognitive frameworks and psychological predispositions affect their response to literature (Applebee, 1975, 1976a, 1976b; Holland, 1975b; Kuehn, 1974; Peters & Blues, 1978; Petrosky, 1976; Thompson, 1974). (Hynds 386)

While power quoting can be an effective way to highlight important information, you can sometimes be more concise by citing one or two important studies. Also, check to ensure that the scholars and studies that you have grouped together truly support the statement you have made. If informed readers believe that you have bundled together studies that actually disagree in their conclusions or that don’t truly support the assertion you have made, you will lose credibility no matter how strong the rest of your argument is.

COPYRIGHT LAW
Thanks to the revision of the copyright law in 1978, your writing is immediately covered. For instance, if you work on a book for several years, the latest draft of the book and any copies you make of it will be considered copyrighted for your life and for fifty years after your death. Because most academics write manuscripts for relatively small audiences and do not expect significant financial compensation, they understandably may not worry about copyrighting material. However, because you will have an easier time proving in court that a potentially lucrative manuscript or idea was yours if it is copyrighted, you may want to register it with the Copyright Office, which generally costs $10 for each application. To get the necessary forms, write to the Register of Copyrights, Copyright Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20559.
Once a manuscript is published, the publisher will need to register it with the Copyright Office. Moreover, published documents should present the copyright notice, which includes the word “Copyright,” the copyright symbol (©), the year of publication and the name of the owner of the copyright, as illustrated below

Copyright © 1991 Thomas Jefferson

Because unpublished manuscripts are still copyrighted without the copyright notice, you need not place the notice on your drafts of incomplete final products. Doing so is not only unnecessary, it may give the editor the sense that you don’t trust him or her.

FAIR USAGE
Unlike the guidelines for establishing copyright, the rules for preserving “fair usage” are subject to debate and litigation. As demonstrated in the following excerpt from the copyright law, no specific word_length guidelines are given for what constitutes fair usage:
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include
(l) The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educaiional purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the poriion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the poteniial malket for or value of the copyrighted work.

Because these guidelines are vague, publishers differ in how many words can be quoted without requiring permissions. A line of poetry or music lyrics, tables, illustrations, graphs, photographs, unpublished personal letters and diaries, company_prepared memos and letters to shareholders, interviews these sorts of documents typically require permissions before a reputable publisher is willing to print them. If you take a line of a song or poem and reprint it without requesting permission from the copyright owner, for instance, you may end up in the courtroom, watching your life savings go toward a lawyer’s new Porsche.
While a journal editor with a limited audience may allow 500 words to be cited, a textbook publisher with a large audience may require permission for 300 words or more. In its guidelines for authors, Greenwood Publishing Group offers the following suggestions:

Most publishers in the United States and Britain allow a certain amount of copyrighted prose or tabular material to be published without their written permission. It is considered “fair use” to quote this material__up to a total of 300 words__ without fear of infringement. If the length of the original work is short, however (for example, an article or a newspaper report under copyright), the proportion of your quoted material to the length of the source is more important than the exact number of words that you have quoted. If you use more than a total of 300 words of direct quotation (in one place or scattered throughout the manuscript), from a single copyrighted work, you must seek formal copyright permission from the copyright owner.

Frankly, the only time you can be absolutely sure that you will not be infringing on someone’s copyright is when you quote government documents or material that was published more than seventy-five years ago. Otherwise, when in doubt, be sure to request permission.
If numerous permissions will be called for in a book, you might also want to negotiate that the publisher will pay for them so that you avoid out_of_pocket expenses or losing your advance. If you are expected to get the copyright permissions, you should check with your publisher to ensure that you use the publisher’s standard boilerplate for permissions.

ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR SUPPORTERS
The last step in the production of an academic manuscript is clearly the most enjoyable: acknowledging your supporters. Authors of articles often acknowledge their supporters in a footnote. In tum, authors of books may have an entire page of acknowledgments in which they thank review readers, colleagues, and friends who made the book possible. Although as a general rule you cannot go wrong thanking your friends and colleagues, it does make sense to share with them your acknowledgments before they are published to avoid upsetting them. For example, I once thanked a colleague with a pass~ge that went something like, “I particularly want to thank Professor X for his careful copy_editing of the manuscript. Professor X is every writer’s fantasy: a careful reader with a critical eye.” Perhaps because I wrote this acknowledgment in a hurry, it never occurred to me that Professor X would dislike being portrayed principally as a reader. Fortunately, I shared the acknowledgment with the professor, witnessed his immediate displeasure, and rewrote it in a way that delighted him, as hoped.

FINAL COMMENTS
While the bulk of our work as scholars is rightfully concerned with interesting, complex issues, we cannot ignore the conventions for documenting sources that are used in our discipline. When editors receive work that is poorly documented, they immediately question the author’s qualifications and commitment to the submitted work. In contrast, properly prepared documents are a joy for editors: they mean that the editor won’t have to write long letters to the author outlining all of the page numbers, journal issue numbers, and dates needed before the work can be published.

WORKS CITED
Boyer, Ernest. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Princeton, N.J.: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990.
Diamond, Jared. “Publish or Perish.” Discover (July 1989): 96-101.
Gere, Anne Ruggles, and Robert D. Abbott. “Talking about Writing: The Language of Writing Groups.” Research in the Teaching of English 19 (December 1985): 362_382.
Hynds, Susan D. “Interpersonal Cognitive Complexity and the Literary Response Processes of Adolescent Readers.” Research in the Teaching of English 19 (December 1985): 386-402.
Sykes, Charles J. ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988.