I’m doing a research paper for my Anatomy & Physiology class. The teacher let us pick our own subject to do, so I picked a subject I knew a lot of information on. I’ve learned a lot of facts about this subject over the past couple years, mainly by talking to doctors and nurses due to my own medical problems.
The question I have is, If I use information I don’t remember exactly where I learned it from, or when, do I have to cite the information in the paper? Or does it count as general knowledge where it doesn’t have to be cited? I know if the teacher asks me if it really is my own knowlege I can prove it, and can even show evidence of where I learned it.
If it matters, the paper is being written in MLA format.
Yep. If it’s not “common knowledge” then you’ll need to refernce it. References aren’t just there to prevent plagiarism, they also serve two other purposes.
Firstly they allow the reader to judge how much credibility to give to your claims. A statement based on an article in “Science” is pretty much unassailable, a statment based on “House” is pretty much worthless, but we can only know what your source is if you tell us.
Secondly they make sure that you have your ducks in a row. You might think that some doctor told you something, but there is no guarantee that you understood what she said, and no guarantee that she knew what she was talking about. Only by finding the reference in print can you be ceretain that what you have heard is correct.
So like he said, chase up the references. The internet makes this so easy these days that it’s really inexcusable not to. What exactly counts as “common knowledge” depends a lot on the author and the audience, but for an undergrad class anything that isn’t in a high school biology text will need to be refernced to a reputable source.
It is certainly possible to cite something as “Private communication with Dr. So & So at Local Community Hospital on Date” (check your handbook for proper format, please), if that is the best or only way to acknowledge that the information originated with a particular doctor (or nurse or person).
But, I don’t think that’s a good way to cite the kind of information you actually have–you have general information gleaned from a number of different conversations, with a number of different medical personnel, and unless I’m missing something, none of these conversations were intended as research opportunities for this paper.
So, I’d also vote for tracking down a source for anything beyond high school biology, and probably even some specific statements within that.
Citing your sources doesn’t just prove the validity of what you write, it also gives people who are interested a place to look for more information if something you write makes them curious. This is probably not a big deal for this paper, but it is part of the reason why citing a biology textbook or a recent peer-reviewed journal article is often better than citing “Nurse Ratchet, private communication, Date” (again–don’t trust my formatting).
Thank you for all your responses so far. Eureka your right, I didn’t have any idea I was doing a research paper on this subject while talking to the medical personnel, and I don’t even remember where I learned certain things. Now, don’t think I’m trying to get away from citing any sources, I have gotten a lot of information on the subject, with a lot of diffrent sources. The main stuff I was wondering if I had to cite is not an important part of the paper, but more information I’m putting in to link stuff I am citing together and to make it a better read.
One reason I’m even suggesting this is because the teacher wants us to limit our internet sources, and I’ve already used up the three internet sources she allows us to use.
An “internet source” is literally a webpage. In contrast university/college libraries will have access to on-line journals and texts via services such as Science Direct or Proquest . These are not internet sources, they are written sources available on line. Even doing a serach via Google Scholar will turn up many full text references to publications.
Those are the sorts of things I menat when I said that the internet makes finding references easy. If it’s been published in the last 30 years then you can probably get access to it via online collections in your library.
You might also look at what sources are cited in Wikipedia for your topic. For popular topics the citation information is often quite good. For more detailed info about a particular topic, try using Google Scholar, which reveals lots of primary and grey literature sources. Most of the resulting fulltext will be in journals which are behind publisher paywalls but you get the cite and often the abstract.