摘要
The practice of providing citations may be understood as an institutionalized code in scholarship whereby later scholars show their grasp of existing material, so that they can utilize standard methods to build on what has already been achieved. Requirements concerning citations are, therefore, nothing less than mandatory and have already become a tradition. However, they are traditional not merely because of tradition, but,more importantly, because of the social option lying beneath them. If citations come in the last analysis from a general option in human behavior, they must have emerged on a spontaneous basis. An analysis based on the option in human behavior can serve to explain why “citation” rather than “quotation” is utilized.
