/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.12280789]

Why can't so many undergrads properly reference? I'm seeing tards posting website links or Google searches.

[Anonymous No.12280814]

>>12280789
Fuck MLA and fuck APA.

[Anonymous No.12280851]

>>12280814
Based

[Anonymous No.12280867]

>>12280814
>>12280851
Do. The. Citations. Correctly.

[Anonymous No.12280898]

>>12280867
You want people to make the citations correctly? How about simplifying the format instead of adding one gajillion rules and exceptions so students always get it wrong.

[Anonymous No.12280905]

>>12280898
There's a million articles and videos on the internet showing you how to do it properly

[Anonymous No.12280968]

>>12280867
Do. The. Citations. Correctly.(1)
----
1 A. Faggot, entry on "https://boards.4channel.org/"

[Anonymous No.12281079]

>>12280789
Because intro-level English and composition keep getting dumbed down. None of the humanities majors I know have this problem. Only STEMbois who shit on the humanities.

[Anonymous No.12281094]

>>12280789
A lot of middle schools gave up on teaching them how to do it, then a lot of high schools did the same.

[Anonymous No.12281129]

>>12280789
Because we live in the age of the internet and link is all you need boomer

[Anonymous No.12281135]

>>12280814
the kaczynski one isn't even supposed to be a citation, crop that cringe pol shit out.

[Anonymous No.12281145]

>>12281129
>"hey dr. anon, where'd that quote come from?"
>click link
>link is dead
>don't remember title or author because it's been years
>shit pants because you're a literal retard who lacks the intellectual curiosity to ask why a system is in place

[Anonymous No.12281157]

>>12281145
this is why internet archive is a thing. whoever makes these standards will just take ages to figure out how technology can improve the situation here. if the link is dead, theres a good chance you won't be able to find whatever was being referenced even with the authors name or article/page title. the old format doesn't work for the modern web.

[Anonymous No.12281174]

>>12281157
The thing is that certain fields take forever to acknowledge modern tech or near modern tech exists. ALw is so fuckign ba in this regard becase a shitlaod of stuff can be reduced in workload or made easier to search up or gather but there's a lot of perverse incentives to not do so.

[Anonymous No.12281185]

>>12281145
Yes Anon. You just found out that knowledge can be lost.

[Anonymous No.12281213]

>>12280905
There's a million different ways to properly do it that all vary by field and institution. Doing it "correctly" is a fucking joke.

[Anonymous No.12281274]

>>12281185
we'd better take steps to prevent that loss, then

maybe by reproducing the knowledge in some small notes at the bottom of the page

that would make it easier to re-establish that knowledge, because it leaves a paper trail others can follow

hmm

what a novel idea

[Anonymous No.12281296]

>>12280789
>open document editor
>insert reference
>fill out name of article, journal, and authors
>if nothing else is included at top of document, I omit it
>finish insertion
Looks good to me.

[Anonymous No.12281654]

>>12281213
>There's a million different ways to properly do it
That is why you use the method asked by your institution...

[Anonymous No.12281688]

>>12281079
At my school, all the STEM professors are going hard at anyone who can't use a decent standard of English and reference properly. Employers are complaining that many graduates in STEM can't write properly.

[Anonymous No.12281749]

>>12281135
Cringe.

[Anonymous No.12281761]

Referencing is really inconvenient and is quite oppressive given that you have to wade through a lot of old works that you may not even have access or time do to so just to make your opinion valid.

Its that immediate dismissal of your opinion that is also discriminatory as you need the words of old dead crusty white men to validate your own knowledge and education for some reason which is really just a typical microagression from an inherently sexist and racist system to justify itself.

[Anonymous No.12281863]

>>12281761
>Referencing is really inconvenient and is quite oppressive

[Anonymous No.12281872]

>>12281761
>also discriminatory as you need the words of old dead crusty white men to validate your own
This is bait, right?

[Anonymous No.12281879]

>>12281761
You're supposed to find the books, journals, articles, reviews, and such BEFORE you start writing. Then it's not difficult to reference at all and most schools will have an electronic copy available of anything you want, sometime with an automatic reference generator. There's no fucking excuse to not be able to reference your work properly in 2020.

[Anonymous No.12282651]

>>12281129
Citing links doesn't get you published retard

[Anonymous No.12282687]

Cus I'm lazy and referencing is for faggots

[Anonymous No.12282773]

>>12280867
Fuck you. I'll give you enough information to find the source in whatever format I feel like using. You're a human, not an Excel macro. You don't need an autistically specific standard format.

[Anonymous No.12282795]

>>12282773
>Uses a wiki article link like a fucking retard and calls it a day

it's trogs like you that are ruining academia

[Anonymous No.12282825]

>>12281145
>>12281274
That's why we should be using magnet links. If literally anyone has the document still online, a magnet always works. It even works when nations actively try to suppress the information as long as someone dares to fight back. It even works if the source is a dozen PDFs, a PowerPoint, a Python script, and a 500MB talk by the author. A magnet can include a display name for humans to reference, and fallback url in case the original source is not content addressable. Online libraries should be serving data via magnet as well as the online portal, and should provide an auto generated magnet to make citations completely trivial and standardized.
But nah, don't listen to the computer scientists. I'm sure your soup of standards which may or may not let you find sources depending on how badly the author fucked up the manual entry process and how obscure the source is, is just as good.

[Anonymous No.12282831]

>prof says do citations properly
>do APA citation
>they wanted MLA
>fail me on my assignment
>it's for a fucking chemistry class

[Anonymous No.12282843]

>>12281688
Good to hear.

I was a MechE and most of my classmates couldn't write for shit. The engineering superiority complex is insufferable.

[Anonymous No.12282954]

>>12280789
not in academia but wouldn't linking directly to the reference be better instead of making people jump through hoops?

[Anonymous No.12282957]

>>12281145
[title, author](url) that was hard

[Anonymous No.12282992]

>>12282954
Doing proper references is an IQ test and evidence that it's above 100.

[Anonymous No.12283003]

>>12282992
so it's just for the sake of looking smart instead of being practical?

[SAGED No.12283010]

(((reference)))

nice appeal to authority

[Anonymous No.12283011]

>>12283003
Both.

[Anonymous No.12283019]

>>12283011
that's really sad, should just be whatever makes it most accessible instead of an insecure pissing contest

[Anonymous No.12283030]

>>12283019
It's very accessible. What's so hard about "Name, Date, Text title, Name of publication"?

[Anonymous No.12283041]

>>12283030
>What's so hard about "Name, Date, Text title, Name of publication"?
I don't know. Lets ask the people who define MLA.

[Anonymous No.12283043]

>>12283041
Lazy people like you are disgusting. You're the reason standards are falling everywhere.

[Anonymous No.12283055]

>>12281761
>NOOOOOO I CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO BACK UP MY ARGUMENTS BECAUSE IT'S OPPRESSIVE NOOOOOOOO

[Anonymous No.12283079]

>>12283010
This, referencing for some experts opinion is an appeal to authority. Unless it's something like referencing data, we shouldn't be accustomating kids into referencing "muh experts" for evidence and it's so fucking used today

[Anonymous No.12283081]

>>12283030
is that really all a reference is? how could someone get that wrong? either way compare that to a link which contains all that and you just click it, making people do unneeded work seems pointless one person adding a link saves more time than the number of readers searching for one

[Anonymous No.12283085]

>>12281135
dilate

[Anonymous No.12283090]

>>12283081
Making the reference takes no time at all and you can just copy + paste the reference into google and it will spit out a fuck ton of pages with your information source on it. There is literally no time wasted if you have an above room temp IQ. Stop being lazy and do the fucking references

[Anonymous No.12283095]

>>12283055
>NOOOOOO I NEED A CRUSTY OLD WHITE MAN TO CLAIM THE SAME THING I HAVE IN MY ARGUMENT SO IT CAN BE JUSTIFIED

[Anonymous No.12283102]

>>12283095
White men invented everything, deal with it bitch.

[Anonymous No.12283117]

>>12283095
That's literally the peer review process dumb fuck

[Anonymous No.12283120]

>>12283043
The reasons standards are failing is because the standards are retarded and there is a dozen of them. Being riddled with optional elements in hope that probably enough information will be included for the reader to find the source in ten years is not a good strategy. Then institutions have made their own standards on top of the public standards in an effort to fix the optional element problem, which leads to brittleness that the optional elements were trying to fix in the first place. Even worse, it also leads to balkanization of a standard into various sub-standards.
What a fucking disaster.

>>12283081
It's not. This is a poster sized cheat sheet for MLA: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/images/20190822MLAPoster.jpg
But it doesn't include everything. Not even close. Instead of dealing with the autism, many writers loosely follow the standard in a way that seems good enough. Then somewhere down the road you can't find that paper because it was only available on a website that no longer exists. So you contact the author and they left academia three years ago to sail the oceans, not before dropping their old work laptop off at good will.

>>12283090
Until in a few years when Google search has degraded so badly that all you get are random shopping pages and social media posts from basically any query.

[Anonymous No.12283121]

>>12283095
top kek fucking based appeal to authority fags btfo

[Anonymous No.12283124]

>>12283090
>Stop being lazy and do the fucking references
Based.

[Anonymous No.12283131]

First thing anyone who teaches undergraduates should do is scroll down to the reference section and see if they can follow simple instructions. If they can't, fail them.

[Anonymous No.12283139]

>>12283010
>>12283079
It's also important to establish facts if you audience might not know whether those facts are trustworthy.

>Gall bladder surgery is sometimes needed to treat kidney stones. (Poopoo)

>(Poopoo) "Surgical Treatments for Common Ailments, a Reference" Dr. P.P. Poopoo, MD

Or to quote literature if you're doing an analysis.

>In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues "la di da di da ..." (Aristotle, 35).

>(Aristotle) "Nichomachean Ethics" in "Aristotle's Ethics," Aristotle, Trans. Oonga Boonga PhD, Paperback edition

This way, the reader can easily verify that the quote wasn't pulled from your ass, since they know exactly what edition and page number to check.

Believe it or not, people still read paper books.

[Anonymous No.12283145]

>>12280789
>american education

[Anonymous No.12283149]

>>12282825
Fucking magnets, how do they work?

[Anonymous No.12283160]

>>12283149
Content addressable storage systems and distributed peer to peer networking.
The future of the Internet since 2001.

[Anonymous No.12283165]

>>12283160
ty

[Anonymous No.12283177]

>>12283055
If it's white it ain't right. My arguments don't need no white mansplaining.

[Anonymous No.12283180]

>>12283120
This hits the nail on the head. Standards are ignored because they have ridiculously complicated rules as if they're intended to be parsed by a machine despite looking like natural text. Hilariously, no paper can automatically have a citation generated for it without a fuzzy algorithm searching the text and trying to guess. The easiest way to cite a paper is to find another paper citing it and copy the citation text. If you want papers cited properly, the solution is very easy. Include a self citation with the paper in several standard formats. This is why so many journals with web viewers include the citation with the paper link. Nobody wants to write this shit.

[Anonymous No.12283181]

>>12283160
It'll always be the future because people are idiots and every peer-to-peer system is crushed unless it's for private corporate use like using torrents to distribute media over your own VPN.

[Anonymous No.12283186]

>>12283180
>ridiculously complicated rules
If you can't put together some simple references using one of the basic methods (Harvard, etc), the chances of you being able to say anything worthwhile are very slim.

[Anonymous No.12283188]

>not using bibtex

[Anonymous No.12283203]

>>12283188
Exactly, these days you can simply post a link and a program will generate them for you, yet so many students still can't do it.

[Anonymous No.12283207]

>>12283188
Bibtex is daddy

[Anonymous No.12283244]

>>12283186
>If you can't put together some simple references using one of the basic methods (Harvard, etc), the chances of you being able to say anything worthwhile are very slim.
The "MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Sixth Edition" is around 300 pages long. If you can't automatically verify the correctness of a citation's syntax, then there's probably a lot wrong.

[Anonymous No.12283251]

>>12283244
Every single university if the Western world has a url or pdf document, usually 1-3 pages, that explain how to reference (in the specific style that they use) and undergraduates are given this information before they write something. Somehow people still can't do it.

[Anonymous No.12283261]

>>12283251
There's a difference between attempting to put a proper MLA citation and actually doing it correctly. Your PDF does not handle everything correctly.

[Anonymous No.12283341]

>>12283261
>So hard

[Anonymous No.12283390]

I just use citethis for me, don't even fill in half the shit.

[Anonymous No.12283483]

>>12280789
>I'm seeing tards posting website links or google searches
Excuse me? Aren't you supposed to learn that in middle school, or high school at worst? I assume that you're either in America or in a ridiculously low-level university.

[Anonymous No.12283855]

>>12280789

I commit the ultimate sin: citing Wikipedia as a source.

[Anonymous No.12283875]

>>12283483
It happens at good schools too. The standards are that low these days at undergraduate level.

[Anonymous No.12284894]

>>12281761
Son, I'm black and I have one word for you.

"Bullshit"

[Anonymous No.12285141]

>>12283251
And every university which does this ends up spitting out a ton of papers with technically nonstandard citations. The only way to distill that 300 pages into 1-3 is through lossy compression.
Every university does this slightly differently, which creates the balkanization even though everyone is using "APA" or "MLA". It also leads to inevitable "uh, the guide doesn't say what to do here" situations, where people almost always just make shit up.
It's a disaster. Academia is full of disasters which everyone seems to force themselves to ignore.

[Anonymous No.12285364]

>>12281079
Stop being a massive racist. All academic papers should be written in pidgin english.

[Anonymous No.12285981]

>>12284894
low iq nigger cant into ironism

[Anonymous No.12285994]

>>12281761

[Anonymous No.12287333]

>>12281761
>>12285364
I know that this is bait, but I'll bite anyway. People who actually study the humanities (e.g. the people who originally wrote the critiques this poster is mocking) never advocate for pidgin english. The positions I ran into during my "Race, Class, and Writing" seminar were:

>Peer reviewers often fail to comment on obtuse style and overuse of jargon. But these are flaws that can make writing unclear. So, peer reviewers should comment on them during the review process. This would encourage academics to publish articles that the public can engage with more easily.

>There are statistical techniques to show roughly how hard something is to read. Authors should use these techniques, and take their results into account, as they revise their work. Those that do show measurable improvement as writers, and report greater satisfaction with the end result.

>Poor people (and minorities) are less likely to have access to academic work due to paywalls. In addition, they tend to have smaller vocabularies due to lack of access to education. This restricts what they can know, since cutting-edge knowledge is expressed in subscription-only journals with difficult language.

>Publishing work in simple language on free-to-access sites like arxiv.org helps lower the above barriers to entry. Some academics like sniffing their own farts, and resist this solution because it keeps them from feeling superior to non-academics.

>Pop-sci and mainstream news coverage of academic work is often misleading or wrong. This gives ordinary people a false impression of what PhDs are up to, and often leads to widespread misunderstanding of entire fields of study. It's better to have an expert engage directly with the public, when possible, since experts are less likely to misunderstand work in their field.

>Basically, academics should interact with normal people more often.

I dare anyone to argue against this.

[Anonymous No.12287442]

>>12287333
Sacrificing the potential significant gains of the truly talented and skilled for marginal mediocrity of the masses. This is how your civilisation dies and I spit on it and the bog of complacency you are so inclined to sleep in.

[Anonymous No.12287511]

>>12287442
You haven't disputed anything I said. How does opaque prose help science? How does putting work behind a paywall help science? How does a lack of interaction with everyday people improve scientists' theories?