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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