Scholarly texts are full of citations (often called in-text citations or parenthetical citations), which are brief indicators of the source of an idea or quotation. Every citation corresponds to a reference, which provides complete bibliographic information for the source (article title, journal title, etc.). References are listed together at the end of a work. This reference list can also be called a bibliography or works cited list.

You must cite your sources in order to avoid plagiarism. But citations also have other purposes. Citations also:

• demonstrate that you've reviewed and understood the literature on your topic.
• place your work in context with that literature.
• indicate whose work you're building on or responding to.

When you write for scholarly publication (or engage in another form of scholarly sharing), your citations do something else as well: They put you in formal scholarly conversation with researchers you cite. By citing their works, you advance the scholarly conversation on that topic. Future works may then cite your work, further advancing the conversation.

Citations are often thought of as "votes of approval" for the cited works. But the situation is more complex than that — authors cite other works for a variety of reasons. A researcher might cite a work to indicate that:

• it is valuable predecessor research.
• it contains helpful background information or a deep dive into a relevant topic.
• the researcher will be extending or building on it.
• the researcher will be contradicting or disproving it.
• it is worth reading for one reason or another, good or bad.

Without reading a work and seeing what's said about each citing item, all we really know is that each citation means: "This work is context for my research." If a work has been cited many times, it's a sign that it's influenced related research. Of course, having influence is not the same as being high quality. Indeed, some highly problematic and even retracted works are heavily cited. Be careful not to confuse quality with popularity or notoriety!

Citations also help you trace scholarly conversations backward and forward through time:

• Tracing backward: When an article is important to your research, look at its bibliography to better understand its context and to identify additional relevant works. You can then look at the bibliographies in those works to continue your quest for context and relevant works.
   
• Tracing forward: To see what later works cite a given article, search for that article in Google Scholar and/or Web of Science (available via GC library). When looking at the search result in Google Scholar, click the "Cited By" link to see a list of citing works; in Web of Science, click the "Citations" link. Most of the time, Google Scholar and Web of Science show different numbers of citations. That’s because they cover different publications and can only “see” the citations in their knowledgebases. Typically, the citation count in Google Scholar is larger.