It seems to me that the variety of referencing systems doesn't help scholarship. EndNote now comes with 3,500 different formats and still doesn't have important journals in my field. For the large number of young scholars and a world community of scholars who don't have/can't afford EndNote or equivalent, redoing a paper in a new house style to submit to a journal raises barriers to the dissemination of good ideas. This variety may serve designers, but it doesn't serve scholars.
I think we're talking about "students" as as sort of undifferentiated mass. First, there are undergraduates, Master's students & Ph.D. students, all of whom have different needs in respect to citation practices. I probably wouldn't mark an undergraduate down for not getting the bits of a citation down properly, but a Ph.D. candidate who can't disseminate knowledge is not prepared for a Doctorate. Then there are different disciplines. Does an undergraduate in Fine Arts Practice or fashion need the same approach to citation that a philosophy student or a biology student needs? And when (BA, MA, Ph.D?) in each of these areas do students need to be prepared for academic publishing? I can't imagine a one-size-fits-all approach to citations.
I don't know what a socialist approach to intellectual property would be. Perhaps that "Information wants to be free" or as Luther and Augustine argued, "knowledge is common property created by and for human communities to edify and communicate" (Swearingen, 1999, p. 21).
Reference:
Swearingen, C. J. (1999). Originality, authenticity, imitation, and plagiarism: Augustine's Chinese cousins. In L. Buranen & A. M. Roy (Eds.), Perspectives on plagiarism and intellectual property in a postmodern world (pp. 19-30). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Erik Borg
Senior Lecturer
English Language Centre
Northumbria University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 8ST
0191 243 7258
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