Demo Paper: Walkthrough

The first item on our list is (Geale, 1976) (shown below) where Recite is saying it can't find a match for the authors OR the year.

When Recite shows this message for a citation, it's likely that a reference list entry is missing completely. If we go down to the reference list section, we can confirm that to be the case. There's no entry for Geale 1976, or anything similar that might be a typo, so it's missed.

When trying to find an entry like this, you can use the author search box at the top of the reference list - enter a few characters and see the list filter immediately. This again confirms this entry is missing.

Back to our second item (Rivest, Nagarajan, & Bose, 1995) (shown below) where Recite is pointing out a missed author from the citation. The reference list has Rivest, R., Codd, E., Nagarajan, M., & Bose, S.(1995), so it looks like we've missed "Codd". Recite highlights the missing entry so that we can immediately see what's wrong.

Our third issue is (Welsh & Lesierson, 1996). Here Recite is pointing out a typo in the name "Lesierson". Our reference list entry has the "i" the other side of the "s" ("Leiserson"), so one of them must be a typo. Recite doesn't know which one is a typo, but it knows there's an error here. We'd need to double check with our original source to check this. If this was an actual uploaded paper, we could use one of Recite's other features to double check, but those are disabled in this demo paper. For reference, you'd normally be able to scroll down to the corresponding entry in the reference list section, hover over that entry and use the GS (Google Scholar) or CR (Crossref) options to double check with an outside resource.

The fourth issue is (Tarjan & Maruyama, 2003) where Recite suggests we have a "Year mismatch". Here, it's clear to see that our reference list has 2004 for the year, whereas our citation says 2003. Again, Recite doesn't know which is correct, but is inviting us to double check our source and correct the one that is incorrect.

For our fifth issue, Recite is suggesting that the citation (Culler et al., 2002) is ambiguous. Here we can see that Recite has found two entries in our reference list that would both correspond to Culler et al. for the year 2002. In this case, APA style says we need to disambiguate this citation to ensure the reader knows which Culler et al. we're referring to. Recite provides a link here, giving us further guidance on how to disambiguate this citation. If we follow the guidance in that article, we actually need to remove the et al. completely and cite all authors in full on each citation.

Our next citation issue (6) is with (Duperre, 1991). In this instance Recite is highlighting an author mismatch, where the author name differs by an accented (diacritic) character for the final "e". This is a common mistake, as people tend to copy and paste the surname from another resource for the reference, but often type it by hand for the citation and end up missing the accent. To fix this issue, we just need to ensure that both entries match up, so either the author's surname has an accented character or not, but the citation and reference list entry shouldn't be different.

Next (7) we have (Tarjan & Maruyama, 2004; Johnson & Shamir, 2002), which is our first issue with an orange side bar, instead of red. This indicates this is a style issue, rather than a mismatch between our citation and reference list entry. The style issue here is related to the way we're ordering the two citations within our parentheses. APA style says that when we're citing multiple works within the same parentheses, we should ensure they are ordered as they appear in the reference list (which itself is alphabetised according to some strict APA rules). In that case, we just need to swap the order around in our citation, such that we have (Johnson & Shamir, 2002; Tarjan & Maruyama, 2004) instead.

For our 8th issue, Recite is highlighting something that it's marked as "Possible Citation?" When Recite does this, it means it's encountered a date outside of parentheses, which may or may not be a citation. Often these can be dismissed, as they are just a mention of a date, rather than something that represents a citation. In this case, it looks like this is a citation, however. The text here is "However during that 2003 work, Miler famously forgot to rest the dynamic under thrust." Here, Recite is noting that we may have an author mismatch, based on a Miller 2003 that's been found in our reference list. From the narrative, we can see we've said "Miler", which is, indeed, a typo of "Miller". This obviously needs correcting.

Our next issue (9) is almost the same as 7 above, as it's an incorrect ordering issue, where multiple cites in the same parentheses should be in the order they appear in our reference list. Again, we just need to swap these around.

Issue 10 is another "Possible Citation?" - "Furthermore, since our application evaluates relational communication, optimizing the Peach foundations codebase of more than 2001 Dos files was relatively straightforward." On this occasion, this does just look like a year mentioned in a normal sentence, rather than a citation. On occasions like this, the human eye wins over the computer, immediately noting that this can be safely ignored. This is a completely normal thing to do in Recite - check the possible issue and ignore if it's actually a non-issue.

11th on our list is (Brigstow, 1995), with Recite suggesting "Year match only". Here, Recite is saying it found an entry in the reference list, BUT the entry doesn't look to be a very good match. In this case, the suggestion of Rivest et al. 1995, is clearly not the correct entry, so we must have a missed entry in our reference list. We do need to double check our reference list, just in case Recite has missed an entry with a really bad typo or something similar, but in doing so, we see that it's an entirely missed entry. We therefore need to add our missing entry for "Brigstow, 1995" to our reference list.

Our 12th issue is (Culler et al., 2002a). For this citation, we appear to be using a trailing letter on the year, in an attempt to disambiguate this citation/reference. However, our reference list doesn't have a corresponding 2002a entry, but it does have two entries Culler / Culler et al. for 2002. As our Culler et al. entries here refer to different authors, the correct disambiguation would be the same as that in Issue 5, where we'd need to specify all authors in full, rather than using an a/b suffix on the year. The a/b suffix is used to disambiguate when the authors (and year) are the same, which in this case they aren't.

Number 13 is "Our overall evaluation methodology seeks to prove three hypotheses: (1) that flash-memory throughput behaves fundamentally differently on our network; (2) that the Internet has actually shown exaggerated median time since 1935 over time; and finally (3) that write-back caches no longer impact ROM speed." Another "Possible Citation?", similar to Issue 10 - this appears to be a year mentioned in the narrative and not an attempt at a citation. Checking this we can immediately see that and can therefore safely ignore it.

The 14th on our list is (Jacobson, 1999; Culler et al., 2002b), where Recite is pointing to an issue with the second part "Culler et al., 2002b". This is an almost identical issue to number 12 and should be resolved in the same manner. Recite is also saying that our two citations should appear in the same order as they do in our reference list (in alphabetical order).

For 15 we have (Bhabha & Suzuki, 2000; Ramabhadran, Chandrasekharan, & Codd, 2000; Duperé, 1991). Recite is suggesting a mismatch on "Duperé, 1991" as it doesn't match with "Duperré, M. (1991)" in the reference list. Here, the citation has one "r" and the reference list entry has two. Again, refer to the source and correct the one that is wrong.

It's worth noting here that Recite isn't pointing out the incorrect order of our citations. This is because until Recite is sure which reference list entry we're referring to (is it definitely Duperré?), it won't check the order of the citations. This is a good illustration of how Recite is an iterative tool and doesn't necessarily give you every possible issue from the outset. You should always re-upload to Recite when you've made corrections, to ensure nothing else is picked up (and to confirm the corrections you've done).

Number 16 is (Welsh and Leiserson, 1996) - another orange style issue, rather than an error. Here, Recite is saying that for a parenthetical citation, the last two authors should be joined with an ampersand (&) and not the word "and".

Number 17 is another style issue. Here, Recite is saying that (Ramabhadran, Chandrasekharan, & Codd, 2000) should use "et al." when citing this reference. As the demo paper is using "APA (6th)" as its target style, only the first use of a citation should use all authors in full (for 3+ authors); all further citations should use "et al.". This citation should therefore be (Ramabhadran et al., 2000).

Issue 18 is another "Possible Citation?" and also an orange style warning. "and the refinement of the Ethernet are confusing Rivest et al, 1995." - This one does appear to be an actual citation, rather than a year mentioned in general text. Recite here is suggesting that the use of et al. is invalid. If we look closely, we see that we have "Rivest et al, 1995", but APA says this should be "et al." (with a dot/period after "al"), so this is indeed incorrect. We therefore need to correct this.

Looking at Issue 19 (Taylor et al., 2002), Recite is saying "Invalid 'et al.' (not enough authors: only 2 found)". If we look at the reference list entry that this citation relates to, we can see that there are indeed only two authors "Taylor, K., & Watanabe, D.", so et al. is used incorrectly. APA (6th and 7th Editions) specifies that et al. is valid for 3+ authors, so we need to use (Taylor & Watanabe, 2002) instead.

Our final citation issue (20) is (Welsh & Leiserson, 1996, Qian, 1994), another style warning - APA says that multiple citations in the same parentheses; should be separated by a semi colon, whereas we're using a comma here.