a question if you will...

[evilgirl_1388]

So, a comment on my lab report was that I totally covered all of my bases with my citing, but that I could have dropped some of them because some of the information I used was considered common knowledge - but really, how do you gauge that? Yeah, I know that they say, information like Canada's Confederation was in 1867 in common knowledge, but ask

Comments

[zhudson]

That's actually a really, really good question, and kind of tough to answer.

A citation really has three primary objectives: to credit the person responsible for a particular piece of knowledge, to give a source of more information on said knowledge, and to convince your reader that you aren't pulling facts out of your ass.

As you mentioned, you generally avoid citations if it's considered common knowledge. But one distinction that may be helpful is that you aren't worried about if it's common knowledge to the general public or not - you need to assess if your information is common knowledge to the people in that field. By that criteria, the fact that glycolysis is the breakdown of glucose in cells would be considered common knowledge and would not require a citation.

Following that, if you knew a particular piece of information without conducting any research, chances are a citation isn't required because it's something an undergrad in science could easily know. However, if you're oddly well-informed about a particular subject, you'll still want citations for reason 3) above - give yourself credibility. For example, I worked on liquid crystal stuff in the summer, and learned some esoteric stuff that would definately require a citation if I were to write about it for one of my classes, even if I could write about it without looking anything up. In a nutshell, if you think your reader/marker will doubt your ability to state a fact accurately and without additional research, even if you really can, add a citation.

Hope that helps; I know it's not nicely black and white, but you'll get a feel for when you need citations and when you don't as you write more and more papers.

[evilgirl_1388]

That is very helpful, thanks a lot. My lab manual, however, is NOT helpful and just says assume that the person reading it knows a little, but not a lot about the topic. Mmmm, ambiguous and kind of vague, just the way they like it.