Is strict adherence to a citation format really necessary in actual research?

Question

In high school and college I remember whenever doing some research for a class, my English teacher then will look at the citation at the end and use a red pen to mark out any place where MLA format is not strictly followed. This is probably the reason that there are 106 million hits for "MLA How?" on Google.

Doubtlessly citation is necessary and very helpful, but I question over the strict adherence to a particular formatting style. But the problem is I have this idea that you must cite with 100% accuracy and adheres to a particular style. It was drilled into my head by my English teachers and professors particularly those in the arts and social sciences. Now I am in graduate school and I am faced with having to cite dozen of extremely well known literature with a very small audience in mind. Some of the authors are who works at another lab down the street or I meet everyday. In all honesty, the citation is done in the off chance someone who reads it and finds that he needs additional literature support.

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By formatting style, I mean any generic formatting style MLA/IEEE/APA (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/) or otherwise that instructs you to cite as follows:

[First Name][Last Name] "[Text]"...[Publisher][Page Number][Chapter]...[Web/Print/Hardcopy...][Date Accessed in m/d/y or d/m/y]...

Don't forget each [...] needs to be separated, by ; , or a dot, or comma as instructed.

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For one, doing a strict alignment with a particular format a huge time waster for the author and practice feels a little bit cultish.

Secondly, if the most necessary information pertaining to a particular reference is included in the citation section, do I REALLY need to ... align the format with a particular citation style with strict adherence? I think nowadays most people just look at the author and the book title and do an online search.

For example, is there a huge problem with writing:

A. Thomasz "Guide to IEEE or MLA format". Dover. 1999. Print.

or

Thomasz Antonie, Guide to IEEE or MLA Format, Dover, 1999.

or

Thomasz Antonie. "Guide to IEEE or MLA Format". www.guidetoieeeormla.com. Web.

Or

A. Thomasz. www.guidetoieeeormla.com.

Actually if I remember far back enough in high school you would actually need to cite another person if he speaks to you. So if I had spoken to Mr. Antonie (made up person), then I would have to cite our conversation in a particular style. "Verbatim" was the word, or "Orally", or "Presentation"? I don't think I have ever done that after high school, even in reality much of what I know is by speaking to other people, yet I never reference any of those people.

I have not yet written a research paper. Is strict adherence to a particular formatting style actually followed in practical research? Is there any big problems that would arise if a particular citation style is not strictly followed?

This question is inspired when I was exploring around and seeing how people in other countries say France do not particularly care about this issue and everything works fine. I am in the hard sciences if that helps.

Comment: looks like an American phenomenon, just so you know in American schools we are taught for the span of 4 years to manually type all citations in MLA (including the full URL link) Here's a paper addressing this interesting cultural practice

Answer 1

First of all, almost nobody formats their references by hand. Typesetting systems such as Latex have a tool for auto-generating references, for instance from a bibtex file (which is essentially a local database of papers that the researcher often cites). Entries into this file are also not really manual in most cases, as bibtex entries for papers can usually be obtained via a quick web search from the publisher. For instance, in the ACM Digital Library (see example entry here), you can click on the right-hand side on Export -> Bibtex and obtain a bibtex entry. Other typesetting systems, such as Microsoft Word, usually have similar plugins or features.

Now, why would your English teacher (or publishers) even care about whether you write Thomasz Antonie or T. Antonie (or Antonie, T., ...)? At the end of the day, this is not so much about understandability of the reference, but more about giving the paper a more professional look-and-feel. For journals it is important to retain their "trademark" optics. This includes obvious aspects, such as font size, column layout, or margins, but also extends to using a consistent reference style within each paper, and also across papers published in the same journal.

Answer 2

No. Most people use automatically generated citations and references. Usually I find some errors (often case errors) and fix them. But strict adherence to a citation style is typically obtained by the copy editor of the journal, or nor at all.

Answer 3

In my field (mathematics), citation style is almost irrelevant. Journals have house styles and most people more or less try to follow them. But I just can't imagine a paper being rejected for citation style issues. Sometimes a copy editor will correct the citations; sometimes not. As a referee I have occasionally complained about lack of citations for material that the authors take for granted as background knowledge, and I have occasionally suggested corrections to the spelling (especially capitalisation) of some cited titles. But given the often illogical and internally inconsistent nature of citation styles I would likely just ignore even relatively blatant inconsistencies.

People tend to be a bit more careful when writing a thesis than for research articles, and of course professionally published books normally receive a thorough copy editing anyway.

I am pretty sure things are quite similar in computer science and physics. At the opposite end, a lot of people in the humanities seem to be obsessed about this kind of thing. I suspect this is related to the fact that they typically have no way of checking whether a claim is objectively true or objectively false. A lot is essentially a matter of opinion. As a result, typical authorities in those fields are never wrong, or rather, would never admit to being wrong. Since walking off in the wrong direction and changing course when you realise it is a key part of progress, this is a very unhealthy atmosphere that tends to favour mediocre, anti-innovative people who obsess over trivial details that are objectively decidable, so that they find (trivial but verifiable) errors in other people's work while making sure they can't be attacked in this way by their kind.

All that said, there are good reasons for citation styles and one shouldn't just ignore them. In particular, since URLs have a habit of becoming invalid after a few years, just naming author and URL (as in the fourth example) is not a good idea. It's bad enough that cited websites can change their content, but with so little information it can even be hard to track down the contents of one that has disappeared.

Answer 4

There are various reasons for this strict format. It makes the reference easy to track. You want to make it as easy for the readers as possible; things that an author invests in, the reader doesn't need to - as the reader should be treated as the more important part of the game - after all, it's the reader for whom an essay is written; without him/her, it's an exercise in futility. Always respect the reader.

Also, in earlier journals space was at a premium, and a compact, yet predictable organisation of, say, a journal reference without superfluous wording (which requires strict ordering of volume/number/year to avoid confusing volume, pages, year etc.) is necessary. Space is less an issue with electronic journals, but is still an issue for paper-based ones.

As others have pointed out, the task is much easier now, due to the existence of software that helps you doing that. It's strongly recommended to use it, as it will much simplify your life.