Referencing and in-text citations: Why and Who can I trust?

Why do I have to include a Reference section?

Imagine your teacher tells your class that the school will be closed tomorrow so you can tell your parents you don’t need to get up in the morning. Would they believe you when you told them? Would they want to see something written down? If you had a note that said the school is closed tomorrow, would it matter who had written it? Would it matter why they had written it? Even if your parents believed it and they wanted to tell your friend’s parents, would they be able to read the same information without you going all the way round to their house to show them the note?

Imagine the government tells everyone that they are going to spend half of the country’s money on flying cars for all the workers and then the country will make more money than before — do you think people would just accept this explanation? Would the public demand to see proof of flying cars before the government spent lots of money on them? What if they proved flying cars existed by showing the newspapers a conversation on the internet, or an article written by someone on carscanfly.com? Maybe flying cars are actually real, but can the government prove a link between the number of flying cars a country has and how rich that country is?

No matter how improbable either of these situations is, you probably read them thinking that you or your parents would want to see some real evidence that these things are true, before being the only person not at school tomorrow or the government wasting lots of money on technology that doesn’t exist. This is true all throughout life, people are making decisions based on the evidence they are presented, and this is another good way that science and scientific writing can really benefit your future life: by questioning what you are told and asking how people know what they are telling you; even why they are telling you certain things.

They can look up the same information and see if the person who wrote it made any mistakes, false assumptions, or maybe even false claims to sell you something. As you are reading this on the internet, you must be somewhat confident at navigating websites and deciding for yourself what constitutes valid information, and this type of critical thinking should also be applied to all your research. 

[By the way, if you are wondering about ABEL’s credentials or reasons for sharing information with you, have a look at our About ABEL pages.]

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