Acknowledging other people's authorship

This is widely regarded as a basic moral principle - that it is unacceptable not to acknowledge another person's authorship of an idea or set of words.

A less censorious moral view is to see citation and attribution as a social convention. This requires you, as members of a research community, to acknowledge:

•	other colleagues' contributions to knowledge,
•	your own debt to that work.

This is often seen as both a social and an economic mechanism, by which academics establish their identity and their worth by their words and ideas.  These then are seen as 'assets' to which they can claim 'ownership' or 'title'. See section 5 for Failing to do it.

Situate your work in its relevant context

We need to situate our work for the reader early in our Introduction, establishing the significance of our (research) topic by reviewing the relevant literature.

Academics are more likely to understand what you are doing if you relate it to what other people have done - what they have published. This is how we slowly build up our 'knowledge' of our subject discipline.

We can identify 2 broad approaches to situating our work, appealing either to:

• theoretical support - citing the works of major figures in the field
• empirical support - citing case studies, often of local relevance

Establish a 'gap' in the research

This is also called 'creating a research space'. Citation & attribution are also used to indicate where work is not being done, or has left gaps in our knowledge of a subject - a gap which you plan to fill or explore.

Showing such a gap in current knowledge of a subject is a standard way of bringing your work to the attention of other academics. It also allows you to make the move:

• from discussing the general state of knowledge about your topic
• to the more specific context of your own study.

Example
"Since these early studies, much work has been done to identify and classify Communication Strategies (for reviews, see Bialystok, 1990; Cook, 1993); however, far less attention has been paid to the question of whether these strategies could be integrated into second or foreign language teaching programs". (Dornyei, 1995: 55-6)

Note: Dornyei is explicitly indicating a gap, but at the same time he is also implicitly indicating what his own area of focus will be: 'far less attention has been paid to X' means 'I will study X'.

See also Research Report

Support your ideas by appealing to authority

We have discussed how, at a general introductory level, we tend to associate our work with more established work - the more prestigious and authoritative the better! This process is continued at the more detailed level of supporting each of our main ideas or areas of argument.

There are many different ways of doing this, some more overt (open) and some more subtle (hidden).
For examples selected from different stages of the reporting process (Introduction, Methods, etc.), see Research reports/articles in section 4.

Criticise other positions & offer your alternative

Not all disciplines value criticism equally. It has been said that direct criticism is rare in biology articles, but very common in linguistics and almost essential in literary criticism. We can try to categorise types of criticism roughly as follows:

•	Weak/indirect
•	Strong/direct

Style will also vary according to the social and institutional culture of the writer, or their level of authority in the field.

Last updated 03 March 2003