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Say like you state in your introduction the following:

This part will examine the demographic reality and the cultural habits of X people in Y country.

In the body of your work, you elaborate with citations:

X people are characterized by a habit of doing A, B and C (Smith 2010, p. 1). They are a population of 100000 (Smith 2010, p. 2), whatever.

Is it required to backup the introduction statement with the same citations? isn't it just a general statement? In case where the 'general statement' (which supposedly doesn't need citations) was inspired by the actual cited study, shouldn't I back it up even if written in a general form?

My question was inspired from this.

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  • If that's what you have, no. You're not mentioning any specific detail in the introduction that would attributable to another person/paper. The only person/paper you could cite for "Section A of my paper talks about topic B" is you/your paper :-) Jun 20, 2016 at 0:52

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Citations are only needed when you make a statement that requires external justification.

Thus, if you say: "This paper will examine X people in Y country" there is no need for external justification, since it is a statement about the paper itself.

When you say "X people in Y country are characterized by a habit of doing A, B and C", however, that's a statement that requires justification, either by external citation or by data presented in the paper.

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