A graduate student in adult education
Source text:
The so-called social media technologies- often referred to as Web 2.0- encompass a wide variety of web-related communication technologies.
Source:
Friedman, L. W., & Friedman, H. H. (2013). Using social media technologies to enhance online learning. Journal of Educators Online, 10(1).
Writer’s text:
Three-dimensional virtual worlds, one variety of web-related communication technologies, often referred to as Web 2.0 (Friedman & Friedman, 2013, p. 4)…
Writer’s comment:
I don’t know if I needed to source it or not. This is common knowledge…I probably did not need to cite this, but I just want to be on the safe side.
I’m not sure about it either but I think it might be better to cite it, because the common knowledge for you may not be common knowledge for others. I’m not familiar with social media technology, so what you have cited is totally new information for me. But if we are writing a paper about something that is new to many people, is it necessary to cite everything that might be common knowledge to people in this field? Does common knowledge have to be as obvious as the fact that the sun rises from the east? I have no idea and I want the answer too. But if I were you, I would probably do the same thing. (A graduate in Education)
In my point of view，I would rather cite one phrase or sentence if it is from another source indeed. For example，I did a lot of work to make sure that the source was not original from other’s essays or some journals during my previous study.
Firstly，it was required by my supervisor. Otherwise，he would not accept the research I did；secondly，it is out of the respect for the authorship；last but not the least，I am from a country where people tend to ignore the protection of intellectual properties and pirate prevails. As a consequence，few people are willing to create something new including knowledge because it is way easier. What’s more，the atmosphere among scholars is getting worse. My previous supervisor told me to keep myself away from this kind of dishonesty and I just bore this in mind.
What you wrote was quite similar with the source. In my opinion，therefore，you made a good decision. (A graduate in Education)
I agree with the writer that the source text is common knowledge and didn’t need to be cited, however, if the journal article informed a lot of writer’s other content and doesn’t get mentioned elsewhere then I think it’s worth finding a way to incorporate an in-text citation. I could be wrong about that though and will surely learn more as I move along with APA.
If it were me, I would have included the URL of the journal homepage even if retreived from a database. This citing includes neither a digital object identifer (DOI) nor the URL. It is possible however, that the article was not retrieved online even though it is available through the ERIC database. The writer didn’t italicize the journal title nor the volume numbers and comma as expected however this may simply be due to the limited formatting options in this blog forum.
This citation appropriately uses only the initials of the authors given names and not the full name with a space between the initials. It properly capitalizes only the first letter of the first word in the article title while capitalizing every major word of the journal title. (A graduate in Education)
I would think the idea that the writer used is not common knowledge. Not only the phrase used in the writer’s text, “Three-dimensional virtual worlds” is quite new, but also the words, such as Web 2.0, that the writer borrowed from the source text have not been first coined until recently according to my google search on that specific term. As such, I would like to say that this is not common knowledge and therefore, the text should be cited appropriately. In that regard, the writer did the right thing in citing the source with the locator. It also seems that there are so many words the writer borrowed from the source text directly word-for-word. I thought using quotation marks around the direct use of the words from the source text on top of the in-text citation should be appropriate, otherwise the writer should paraphrase the part. (A graduate in Education)