Referencing is supposed to improve writing by making it accountable to its sources and to external facts. But the rise of in-text referencing has been bad for academic writing, making it even less readable and encouraging readers and writers to mistake appeals to authority for the truth. Addressing the problems of referencing will help improve how we think as well as how we write.  

Browse the writing guide on any university website and you’ll soon alight on a webpage explaining the importance of referencing for academic integrity. Referencing is important because it makes the writer more accountable to their sources. It makes the writer more credible by ensuring that each claim is backed up by the best available evidence in the form of little nuggets of authoritative truth. It provides the reader with access to useful further reading on the subject of the piece. Referencing enforces scientific integrity on ever-broader domains of knowledge, enabling the social sciences to operate in a similar manner to the empirical sciences when it comes to building new sets of ideas from established units of work. From the premises established by credible references, we can infer new and reliable conclusions.

That is, at least, how referencing is supposed to work. But the social sciences in particular are in the grip of a replication crisis, with the majority of published studies in some areas of psychology and an increasing number of studies in economics failing to replicate. Factors contributing to this crisis include publication bias, selective reporting of results and flawed statistical methods. If the aim of referencing is to root claims in externally verifiable truth, those truths are looking shaky.

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Authority – whether or not a study or author is high-status – becomes a substitute for truth. 

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Referencing carries a cost to the written text too, imposing cumbersome parentheses that contribute to the notorious unreadability of academic writing. Parenthetical referencing, in which the author and date is inserted into the text, became more dominant as a citation style from the late 20^th century onwards. First used in a paper about slugs by a Harvard zoologist in 1881, it evolved in Harvard and then in wider academic communities as a means of signposting the reader to previous works at a glance, without the laborious task of tracking down the footnotes. The American Psychological Association adopted a similar style in 1952 which became popular across the social sciences, emphasising the relevance of the author and the date of their research.

This style of referencing drops an appeal to authority within each claim: this point is valid because X said so. While the intention may have been to use the author of a paper as a proxy for the empirical content of the paper itself, as social animals we tend to assign status to ideas based on whose ideas they are. The credibility of that empirical content is also less secure in the social sciences, in which many influential theories are purely qualitative, and where quantitative studies are prone to subjective interpretation. Authority – whether or not a study or author is high-status – becomes a substitute for truth. 

It becomes more tempting for writers to name-drop authors who are socially or professional salient to them, while perpetuating the self-deception that the practice of referencing is hewing their work closer to the truth. This also militates against original thinking, because it’s socially safer to stay within the domain of authoritative – or high-status – ideas than to carve out anything new.