DBAX 8101 Week 8 Whole-Document Citation Pass Example

Throughout Means Throughout: A Whole-Document Citation Pass on an Interview Study of Client Retention at Small Digital Marketing Agencies, Checking Citations and References Against Each Other in Both Directions

Student Name

Walden University

DBAX 8101: Business Research Project Mentoring

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Throughout Means Throughout: A Whole-Document Citation Pass on an Interview Study of Client Retention at Small Digital Marketing Agencies, Checking Citations and References Against Each Other in Both Directions

Why a Whole-Document Pass

For three rounds, my mentor's notes included some version of "check citations throughout." Each time, I fixed the instances flagged in the margin. Each time, new problems were flagged elsewhere. A note that says "throughout" means throughout. This pass reconciles every in-text citation in my draft with the reference list, in both directions, and logs each correction by type. The study is an interview study of how small digital marketing agencies retain clients, and the draft currently runs to about 24,000 words.

Method

I extracted every in-text citation from the draft into a spreadsheet, noting author, year and page or section. I did the same for every entry in the reference list. I then matched them both ways: each citation to a reference entry and each reference entry to at least one citation. For mismatches, I opened the source to confirm the correct details rather than guessing. Formatting followed the APA manual (American Psychological Association, 2020).

Counts

Table 1

Citation Pass Summary

Composite study. Counts from the reconciliation spreadsheet.

Corrections by Type

The nine reference entries cited nowhere were mostly sources I read early and later dropped from the text. Five were removed from the list. Four were sources I had meant to discuss in the literature review section on account management; I added a sentence citing each where it belonged, after rereading them to be sure they supported the sentence.

The four citations with no reference entry were added during revisions without updating the list. All four were found and added, and each was checked against the sentence citing it.

The seven name discrepancies came mostly from authors with compound or hyphenated surnames and from one author whose name I had misspelled consistently in the text. The six year discrepancies came from citing an online-first date in the text and the print date in the list; I standardized on the version I had read.

The three secondary citations were the most serious problem. In each case, I had cited a classic source that I had read about in a later article but had not read myself. APA guidance is to cite the secondary source and name the original as cited in it, unless the original has been read. I located and read two of the three originals and corrected the third to a secondary citation.

Residual List

Three items need my decision rather than a mechanical fix. A trade-association report I cite has no stable URL; I need to decide whether to keep it, replace it with a peer-reviewed source or cite it with its retrieval details. Two interview transcripts are referred to by participant code in a way that may identify one participant to someone who knows the industry; I need to revise the codes. And one source's page numbers differ between the online and print versions; I need to confirm which version I read.

Time Taken

The pass took about six hours, most of it spent opening sources to confirm details. That is longer than fixing flagged instances, but it was the first time in four rounds that the citation note did not come back, and the spreadsheet will make future passes much faster because each new citation can be checked as it is added.

What the Pass Taught

The patterns show where the errors come from: revisions made without updating the reference list, early sources never removed and classics cited from summaries. A citation manager would prevent the first two. The third is a reading habit. Booth et al. (2016) stress that researchers must report sources accurately so readers can trust and follow them; a reference list is the record of that trust.

Going Forward

I will reconcile the full document before each submission, not only the flagged instances, and keep the spreadsheet updated as I revise. Kamler and Thomson (2014) describe the literature as a conversation the writer joins; careless citation misrepresents who said what in that conversation.

References

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.).

Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., Williams, J. M., Bizup, J., & FitzGerald, W. T. (2016). The craft of research (4th ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2014). Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision (2nd ed.). Routledge.