Web 2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2008.03.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Web 2.0 authoring forms such as wikis and blogs, social bookmarking, and audio and video podcasting pose a challenge to academic authorship traditions. This paper reviews the provisions made in major academic referencing and citation style guides for acknowledging content and ideas that may be published using these new web authoring forms. It offers an overview of features of web 2.0 authoring forms and explores concepts of authoring that can help academics to understand the challenges of working with these forms. It provides examples of referencing and citation in scholarly and scientific communication, and concludes that the conceptual basis of referencing and citation as expressed in current systems and standards needs reform in order to bring academic integrity to the use of these new forms of authorship.

Introduction

Creative, user-friendly web 2.0 authoring is burgeoning outside of academia; there is flourishing public use of a range of widely available new web authoring forms. In formal academic settings in the early part of the 21st century it may be not only feasible but preferable to use these forms to fulfil essential functions of scholarly communication — registration, certification, dissemination, archiving and recognition (Roosendaal and Guerts 1997 cited in Van de Sompel and Lagoze (2007, p. 32)). If so, it is critical that there are thoughtfully designed academic protocols for using such forms, to ensure that any changes preserve the core values of rigor and integrity in scholarly and scientific writing. McDonald (2006) (p. 1-2 of 6) argues that, in “this move toward the acceptance of a fluid publishing model […] it is still important that we not destroy the integrity of the intellectual property we now find so easy to copy and manipulate”. Whether or not they choose to adopt and adapt these new authoring forms in their own research and teaching, academics must respond to the impact of new authoring forms on traditional academic writing practices and expectations, and their response must be a collective one.

This paper begins with an overview of the features of web 2.0 authoring forms, raising questions about the use of web 2.0 authoring as a mode of scholarly and scientific communication. Academics' reliance on current referencing and citation style guides runs the risk of providing too little information about web 2.0 sources, thus attenuating the tradition of the ‘great chain of knowledge’ on which academic work rests. This paper reviews the provisions made in major academic referencing and citation style guides for acknowledging content and ideas that may be published using new web authoring forms. It uses examples to show that researchers and writers of scholarly and scientific works are making reference to content that is published in such forms, and are making a variety of efforts to attribute such content appropriately. It concludes that the conceptual basis of referencing and citation, as expressed in current systems and standards, needs reform in order to bring academic integrity to the use of these new forms of authorship. Academic authors should be able not only to reference but also to produce original work in these forms, knowing that such work is cited in a manner enabling recognition and critical appraisal by others.

Section snippets

Features of web 2.0 authoring forms

Blogging, podcasting, social bookmarking, social networking and wiki writing are the examples of web 2.0 authoring forms which are the focus of this paper. While treated somewhat separately here, in fact they often are found closely integrated in a single web site. Some of the findings in this paper may apply equally to other web 2.0 authoring forms of expression, such as collaborative document editing, instant messaging, and virtual worlds.

A blog has been defined as “an easily created, easily

Observing current referencing and citation practices

Web 2.0 authoring forms are being cited in scholarly and scientific writing at present. Table 1 shows examples of the kinds of citations of web 2.0 authoring forms that can be found in a cross-section of current scholarly and scientific papers from peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.

The paucity of detail provided in these references (column 1), compared to the detail of the convention used in describing the referring paper (column 2), attests to the lack of information upon which

Conclusion

Referencing and citation may be used for purposes which are, inter alia, corrective, corroborative, documentary, evidential, historical, informational, methodological (Hodges 1978 cited in Cronin 1984 cited in Friedman (2005, p. 17)). The associated principles, protocols and practices are an essential part of the repertoire of academic integrity. The picture that this paper presents of what is happening to this aspect of academic integrity is symptomatic of a larger change in how theoretical

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to acknowledge the contribution of their colleague Martin Dick of RMIT University in helping to shape the ideas in this paper.

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