Best practice for academic writing: write and cite or write first?

I figured it'd be a good thing to figure out now, as there will be many such assignments in my future (including, God-willing, a doctoral thesis).

* I usually write in Microsoft Word, and make good use of their citation manager. (Which, incidentally, is why I did not use the apa tag -- this question is not specific to APA citation format. Citation formatting is not something I even think about anymore: I just put the relevant info into Word and let the program sort it out :-)

I am not using the word "citation" to mean "quotation," @JasonBassford. I mean something like: "Social media usage has increased massively since the introduction of social networking services, with estimates of total users numbering in the millions (boyd 2008)" = not a direct quote, but the source for the assertion I made in that sentence. (an example from a paper I'm currently writing) || (Is "citation" the wrong word? 😳)

6 Answers 6

My answer is that you should read widely and then write and cite, because you want the foundation you're building upon to be rock solid. The risk of writing first and inserting later (which is a common approach and easier) is that if you write your paper first, (telling yourself you want the flow of it), you'll find yourself wanting to cherry pick citations (whether they're good or bad) to fit your existing paper.

As a psychology student, I'm sure you see the problem with cherry picking sources?

Write and cite. At the end of the paper, you will still need to go back and add in additional sources.

You're not writing creatively in these assignments. You're not writing fiction, it's not stream of consciousness. It's closer to technical writing. You're not creating a persuasive argument in the way you were taught in school. You're not using rhetoric, not to the same extent anyway. You're synthesizing rigorously tested ideas into a new framework. It's different.

I urge you to view your paper as 50-90% 'existing knowledge and work' and 10-50% 'your framing of that.' Your job is to take what has been established in the field and bring it together in a compelling way to help people see your thesis.

That's basically what I was going to say (source - I taught ENGL101 and Tech Writing at a local college for 12 years.) Citations aren't to be 'sprinkled in,' but the works you are citing are an essential part of your own paper's framework. You can do a quick/casual citation (just the URL, or a short title of the paper and other ID info, like page #) for the draft , instead of worrying about the formal details. But build WITH your sources, not independently of them!

"Write and cite" is good practice that you should start getting accustomed to early on. The longer the piece you write, the more sources you would have to juggle. Now, imagine there are twenty articles you would be citing, four of them say something relevant to the point you're making in one single paragraph. Working by "write first, cite later", you'd need to meticulously go over those four articles (if you remember which four those were - otherwise it's all the twenty), to find which article said which particular thing you're referring to. Repeat for each and every paragraph. That's a lot of work. Now imagine you're writing your thesis, citing several hundred sources. "Write first" becomes impossible. Don't forget that every piece of information and every idea you gleaned from somewhere needs to be cited. And as @DPT states, a large part of your writing would be looking back at the existing literature.

Forget writing a complete piece in one sitting. You won't write even your thesis proposal, let alone your thesis, in one sitting. There's way too much research into existing literature that you'd need to do. And since you don't write everything all at once, things bleed into each other, you don't always remember which article a particular idea came from. So if you don't cite at once, you have to go looking for it all over again.

I find it useful to summarise each source as I read it, copy out the ideas I will need to refer to later, and attach a citation to that. This process also helps me arrange everything in my head. But more relevant to your question, when I come to actually writing whatever it is I'm writing, I can copy-paste the already-formatted citation from the pre-made page, instead of breaking my chain of thought to find the relevant information for the citation manager.