What makes an authority?

• significance
• uniqueness
• acceptance
• timeliness
• duration

What proper citations do for us:

• establish our own authority through our relationship to major authority
• allow our readers to review (and reproduce!) our work for themselves, judging both its originality and its significance
• act as a hedge against plagiarism
• ensure that we understand the reliability of what we see and hear
• prevent us from gratuitous corner-cutting
• allow us to reuse our knowledge base, while minimizing reuse of words and paper

To provide all these benefits, cited sources should include a minimum amount of information to enable readers to find them:

• Title of article or book
• Author(s)/editor(s)
• Publication (if article); Forum (if posting to a newsgroup or message board)
• Publisher (or sponsoring company/organization)
• Publication date (or date last updated for an Internet-based source; if that's not available, offer the date of your access to the source)

Comparing Sources

The following table is supplied by the College of New Jersey library, and is used by permission.

	SCHOLARLY JOURNALS	NEWS / GENERAL INTEREST	POPULAR MAGAZINES	SENSATIONAL PUBLICATIONS
FORMAT	grave, serious	attractive	glossy, attractive	cheap, newsprint
GRAPHICS	include graphs and charts -- objective to illustrate concepts	include photos, illustrations, and eye-catching graphics -- objective to enhance appearance	include photos, illustrations, drawings, and eye-catching graphics -- objective to enhance appearance and image	include melodramatic, lurid, and perhaps even doctored photos -- objective to get emotional reaction from reader
SOURCES	sources with footnotes and or bibliographies	occasionally cite sources, but not as a rule	rarely cite sources; original sources may be obscure	rarely cite sources
AUTHORS	scholars or researchers in the field or discipline	staff, free-lance, or scholarly writers -- for an educated general audience	staff or free-lance writers -- for a broad-based audience	staff or free-lance writers
LANGUAGE	includes discipline-specific terminology and jargon	appropriate for educated readers	simple language for minimal educational level short articles with little depth	simple language for minimal educational level may include inflammatory or sensational style
PURPOSE	inform; report on original research; make results available to scholars	provide general information to a broad and interested audience	entertain or persuade; sell products or services	arouse curiosity and interest with distorted truth and outrageous, startling headlines (e.g. "Jesus' face on Dark Side of Moon!")
PUBLISHERS	professional or academic organizations	commercial enterprises; for profit	commercial enterprises; for profit	commercial enterprises; for profit
ADVERTISING	selective; appropriate to audience	general	general; lots of it	as lurid and startling as the stories
EXAMPLES	Harvard Business Review AIAA Journal Transactions of the IEEE	Newsweek Fortune Entrepreneur Wired Machine Design	Better Homes and Gardens Glamour People Sports Illustrated	National Enquirer Star

Before You Search

Because a search, whether indexed (such as through a library) or via Web search engines, can result in lots of useless information, it's important that you know what you want before you search.

• Map out the keywords you'll use. One search may suggest other keywords, but you should have some in mind first.
• Consider the questions you'll be asked.
• Remember that nouns give a more precise search than words with less substance, especially longer nouns, proper nouns, or strings of two or three words.
• Remember that even scholarly journals have limits to their reliability. Since people edit the journals, reliability increases with the number of editors -- at least until there are too many to be efficient. Some journals also have the policy of rejecting a minimum proportion of submissions, and this is not an objective way to get research out. Still, journals are generally more reliable as sources of technical information than other media, except as sources of specialty info such as product specs.

Copyright and Fair Use

[NOTE: I'm not a lawyer. This isn't legal advice here.]

If it's original, and it's published in some manner, then it's copyrightable. On the other hand, processes, systems and forms of ideas can't be copyrighted. Those you must patent.

If it's copyrighted, it can be performed or displayed publicly -- but the creator holds the exclusive rights to do that, except in cases of "fair use" such as

• libraries and archives
• face-to-face teaching activities

I've been told that Blockbuster forces us to give up our rights to fair use in signing movie rental agreements. My local Blockbuster says this isn't true -- at least for them. Your mileage might vary. Fair use is defined as follows:

• Purpose -- is it for commercial use or nonprofit educational?
• Amount -- how much of the copyrighted work is really used?
• Nature -- is the work factual? published?
• Effect -- does the usage affect the market for the work?

References

Gibaldi, J. MLA Style Manual. NYC: Modern Language Association, 1998. ISBN 0-87352-977-4
Ken Crews on fair use and copyright permissions
Copyright Clearance Center
US Copyright Office
Brad Templeton's "Ten Big Myths About Copyright Explained"