The Citation Project collected student writing from required lower division writing courses, first as a pilot study on one campus and then as a national study spanning multiple campuses. The student writing analyzed in the original Citation Project was collected between 2006-2009.
Our research team (Ana Castellon, Andrea Hernandez, Casey Manogue, Sasha Osorio, and Trish Serviss) wondered--what would we find if we replicated the Citation Project now, collecting and initially analyzing data during the 2025-2026 academic year? In particular we wondered:
- How are students writing with and from sources today, about twenty years after the first corpus of student source-based writing was collected?
- What developments in writing technologies, information literacy, writing curricula approaches and writing pedagogies might we encounter as we collected and analyzed student writing produced in 2025-2026?
- What methodological challenges might they pose to a replication effort?
- What new questions might a close analysis of student source-based writing provoke?
We collected student writing from 18 different sections of lower division, required writing courses in California in the fall of 2025 and identified 20 student papers for a pilot replication and expansion coding project. Initial findings will be presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in March 2026 in Cleveland, OH in our session: "What Are Students Doing with Sources Now? How Undergraduate Source Use Has Evolved Since the Original Citation Project" on Friday during Session H (12:30-1:45PM).
Further reading:
Serviss, T., & Jamieson, S. (Eds.). (2018). Points of departure: Rethinking student source use and writing studies research methods. University Press of Colorado.
Rodrigue, Tanya K. “Digital Reading: Genre Awareness as a Tool for Reading Comprehension.” Pedagogy. Volume 17.2. April 2017. 235-257.
Jamieson, Sandra. “What the Citation Project Tells Us About Information Literacy in College Composition.” In Information Literacy: Research and Collaboration across Disciplines. Perspectives in Writing Series. Edited by Barbara D’Angelo, Sandra Jamieson, Barry Maid, & Janice R. Walker. Fort Collins, Colorado: WAC Clearing House & University Press of Colorado, 2017. 119-143.
Kleinfeld, Elizabeth. “Using Citation Analysis in Writing Center Tutorials to Encourage ‘Excessive Research’.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. Vol. 13, No. 2. 2016.
Serviss, Tricia. “Using Citation Analysis Heuristics to Prepare TAs Across the Disciplines as Teachers and Writers.” Across the Disciplines, 13 (3). online. 2016.