Scholarship as Conversation

The primary reason you want to cite sources is to show how your ideas interact with what other scholars have written. Using citations in an article is the way scholars have conversations (or arguments) with each other on different topics and ideas.

By interacting with different sources and scholars through citations, new ideas and theories can be developed, tested, and confirmed (or rejected) through this process of scholarly communication. This process is also referred to as "Scholarship as Conversation".

The sources you cite in a paper help you enter the scholarly conversation and, by interacting with other sources and scholars, your ideas will carry more weight resulting in a higher quality paper.

 

 _{Image from thequotes.in}