If you are a new research student, you might be wondering why do you need to cite previous articles in your proposal or report. In fact, it would be weird if you submit a report whereby only minimal references are given in the problem statement section.
And this brings us to the question of why do we need to cite previous articles?
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Give credits to those work
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When you include citations, you are actually giving credits to the authors of these articles.
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There are times when an article is cited in a negative manner (rarely though) but in most cases you are writing to lay the ground for the work that you will be doing / reporting. Including references to related articles acknowledges the effort that these authors have made to pave the way to what we have learnt in the field.
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Shows that you have made substantial review of the field.
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When you submit a manuscript with very little references, it reflects (or that is a fact) that you are not well acquinted with the field.
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This is crucial if you are writing a research proposal because you might end up proposing a project which have been done before. Or that the work that you are proposing is not going to work. But without doing enough reviews, you will missed these things.
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So you might say you done substantial review of the field but you don’t want to put in references. Let us just assume that this is the case. But well how do you convince your reviewer? Nothing else but those carefully selected references.
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What you write in your manuscript is yours except when you declare them in the form of referencing it to previous articles.
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What this means is that if your report incorporates idea from other sources but you include this without citation, it means that you are indirectly stealing the credit of others. And this will reflect badly on you.
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So we can be generous with citations but lets not over do it too. You should make sure that the references are in-line with the manuscript that you are writing. And in case if you are wondering if you should cite research articles or technical reports that was published a long, long time ago… you can read my short take on this in this link.
