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I am writing a paper (about the usage of renewable energies) and I have the following sentences: "In 2016, wind and PV contributed about 12% of Europe's electricity supply [SOURCE1]. A study carried out by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission concludes that a tripling of this contribution is needed in order to reach the 2030 target [SOURCE1]"

Is it okay to cite SOURCE1 in two consecutive senteces. I am talking about naming the source. Or is it more advisable to use the source information only once at the end of the second sentence like: " In 2016, wind and PV contributed about 12% of Europe's electricity supply. A study carried out by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission concludes that a tripling of this contribution is needed in order to reach the 2030 target [SOURCE1] "

I appreciate your input. Thanks in advance.

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  • How big is SOURCE1? If it is more than a few pages, cite not only SOURCE1, but also the page number (or another way to find that spot without reading the whole paper). Then, of course, use separate reference if the reference it for different pages.
    – GEdgar
    Commented Nov 10, 2018 at 1:09
  • You might look into "ibid." and "loc. cit." Although I rarely see them used in my field (mathematics), they were quite popular with English teachers when I was in high school and college. So I conjecture they're approved by style guides.
    – Andreas Blass
    Commented Nov 10, 2018 at 2:16

2 Answers 2

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Is it ok from an academic point of view? Absolutely. It is never wrong to cite a source that you use. However, it might be "wrong" from an flow-of-the-text point of view. I would sidestep the issue by just reformulating the two sentences. Something along the following lines would perhaps resolve your problem:

"As noted in [SOURCE1], wind and PV contributed about 12% of Europe's electricity supply in 2016. That study, carried out by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, concludes that a tripling of this contribution is needed in order to reach the 2030 target."

or even

"As noted by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, wind and PV contributed about 12% of Europe's electricity supply in 2016 [SOURCE1]. There, it is concluded that a tripling of this contribution is needed in order to reach the 2030 target."

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I would say it is absolutely acceptable to cite the sources like in your example. From the stylistic point of view, a number of people take references to be annotations which are not supposed to interact with the grammar, in the sense that they are not grammatically part of the sentence, thus repeating a reference is not like frequent usage of a single word or phrase.

While @Phil's suggestion is great for the cases where your claims can be reformulated, sometimes that is not possible, in which case your suggested style is the way to go. In the following example, reference [1] is first used as a general, survey reference, and in the following sentence to back a specific technique explored as part of the survey along with some other examples, so wrapping it up to a single mention would not be practical.

The first step the process of fruity entertainment process is typically fruit juggling [1]. Most commonly employed tools are various tropical fruits such as mango [1], pineapple [2] and papaya [3].

[1] B. I. G. Authority: Survey of fruity entertainment strategies.

[2] P. Ine-Apple: Advances in fruity entertainment through the use of pineapple.

[3] P. Apaya: The importance of tropical fruit for fruity entertainment.

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