discuss: Correctly referencing another author(s) in a document
Subject:
Re: Correctly referencing another author(s) in a document
From:
Mary Gardiner ####@####.####
Date:
17 May 2003 09:42:26 -0000
Message-Id: <20030517094216.GC472@titus.home.puzzling.org>
On Sat, May 17, 2003, Guru - wrote:
> But with UNIX tools this is quite hard, because I would have used
> information from various sources without even remembering where I
> learned this information (but I don't think thats illegal because I
> would have formed my own ideas from what I learned and it may not look
> anything like the source).
Again, in academia, I've heard a very rough guide: "information you can
find in more than four places doesn't need to be cited". Now, that's
very rough, some things will always need to be cited - just because you
can find four people who write that the moon is made of cheese doesn't
mean that it's an unquestionable fact.
A vaguer but better test is "is it common knowledge among people working
in this area/with this tool?"
> For most of the tools I have probably used very small amounts from the
> manual page, does this matter? Because I don't think you can copyright
> every single word in a document.....
I would suggest putting quote marks around any full phrase.
> I will have to go through my document and add various citations for
> blocks of text which I have used from various sources but if I
> reference every little section when I've used information from other
> sources then half of my entire document will be citations and quotes.
Well, I don't know how much citation the TLDP will require. It concerns
me a little that all the questions in your email were "is this legal?"
rather than "is this ethical?"
Use your common sense. If someone's work has saved you time, acknowledge
that help. At the same time, don't waste your reader's time by littering
your document with unneeded citations. There is a fine balance here, but
you can use common sense to judge it.
If a section of your work relies extensively on other work, mention
that. It doesn't need to be cited after every sentence, but noting in
the introduction something like "these command line options are found on
the blah man page which also documents less commonly needed command line
options" wouldn't go astray in my opinion.
-Mary
