MGMT 8910M Week 8 Reference Audit Example

What Each Citation Is Doing: A Reference Audit of a Dissertation on Trade Credit Among Small Apparel Importers, Listing Every Location Each Source Is Cited and the Job It Does There, Harvesting Eleven Decorative Citations and Spot-Checking the Ten That Carry the Most Weight

Student Name

Walden University

MGMT 8910M: Dissertation Development Process

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What Each Citation Is Doing: A Reference Audit of a Dissertation on Trade Credit Among Small Apparel Importers, Listing Every Location Each Source Is Cited and the Job It Does There, Harvesting Eleven Decorative Citations and Spot-Checking the Ten That Carry the Most Weight

Method of the Audit

The dissertation studies how small apparel importers in the United States negotiate payment terms with overseas suppliers. Its first three chapters cite 84 sources. For the audit, every in-text citation was listed by source, with every location where the source appears and the job it does at each: grounding a factual claim, defining a construct, supplying a method precedent, or offering a finding the study positions itself against. A source whose job column reads "none" at every location is decorative: it is cited, but removing it would weaken nothing. The sorted table below shows a sample of the 84 rows.

The Audit Table

Table 1

Sample Rows From the Reference Audit, Sorted by Source

Sources A to E stand in for rows in the full table; the two named rows are shown in full because they carry the most weight.

The Harvest

Eleven sources turned out to be decorative. Most appeared in clusters of four or five after a single general sentence, such as "Trade credit is widely used in international commerce," where any one well-chosen source would have done the work. Seven were replaced. Four were replaced because a newer study now covers the same ground with better data. Three were replaced because the citation was secondhand: the dissertation cited a textbook or review for a finding the textbook had reported from an original study, and the original was not read. Those three now cite the original, after it was located and read. The remaining four decorative sources were deleted without replacement.

The Spot-Check

The ten sources carrying the heaviest load, measured by the number of locations at which they do a job, were reopened and checked against the sentences that cite them. Nine say what the text claims. One does not. Source D was cited twice for the claim that small apparel importers rely heavily on supplier credit; on rereading, it reports results for small US importers across all product categories and does not break out apparel. The sentence now says "small importers" and cites Source D for that, and a new source specific to apparel is being sought for the narrower claim.

Harzing (2002) traced how a widely cited figure on expatriate failure rates spread through the literature by repeated miscitation, without any empirical study behind it. The spot-check is meant to catch the first step of that process in one's own work: a claim slightly stronger than the source, repeated because it was convenient. Petersen and Rajan (1997), the dissertation's most-cited source, passed the check at all three locations. Klapper et al. (2012), the second most cited, passed at both, though one sentence was rewritten because it described their contracts as coming from apparel firms, which the article does not say.

References

Harzing, A.-W. (2002). Are our referencing errors undermining our scholarship and credibility? The case of expatriate failure rates. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23(1), 127-148. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.125

Klapper, L., Laeven, L., & Rajan, R. (2012). Trade credit contracts. The Review of Financial Studies, 25(3), 838-867. https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhr122

Petersen, M. A., & Rajan, R. G. (1997). Trade credit: Theories and evidence. The Review of Financial Studies, 10(3), 661-691. https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/10.3.661